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DEATH AND LIFE. 



DEATH AND LIFE. 



BY 



{&+* 



jJ^I 



MARY G. WARE, 

AUTHOR OF "ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER," AND "THOUGHTS IN MY GARDEN. 1 



' Wa S hlT>^ 0? 



BOSTON : 
WM. CARTER AND BROTHER, 

21, Brojifield Steeet. 

1864. 






■>IA*° 



V 



5 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 18G3, by 

WM. CARTER AND BROTHER, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



boston : 

stereotyped and printed by john wilson and son, 

No. 5, Water Street. 



TO 



THE ARMY OF MOURNERS, 

WHOSE TEARS ARE THE PRICE OF OUR NATIONAL EXISTENCE, 

&fjts Uoiutne is Befctcatetf, 

IN THE HOPE THAT IT MAY TEND TO SOFTEN THE SORROW 

THAT HAS COME FROM DEATH 

BY QUICKENING THEM TO A TRUER LIFE. 





CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Death and Life 9 

Mourning for the Dead 31 

Memory in the Future Life 53 

Spiritualism 73 

The Building-up of Regenerate Life 99 

The Past and the Future 133 

War and Peace 157 



DEATH AND LIFE. 



Death is the ending of an old state, and the beginning of a new 
one. Every night we die as to all that concerns to-day, and every 
morning our awaking is a true resurrection as to all that concerns 
to-morrow. Each new day or state is built up out of all the preced- 
ing ones : and death is not so much destruction as construction ; not 
a ceasing to live, but the beginning of a more advanced life. 




DEATH AND LIFE. 



SiSipl HQEVER contemplates_li£e witluthouo ; 

rl ""I " ^^ 

Mm fuLiiuth_must feel convinced that G 






ht- 
God 
and man look upon it from a totally dif- 
ferent point of view, and value it in an entirely 
different way,. To jnost persons, life, as a mere 
present enjoyment, is of priceless worth, loved for 
its own value witli a blind passion, in spite of pov- 
erty, sickness, misfortune, or bereavement. "All 
that a man hath will he give for his life ;" and, to 
many, the saddest thing in life is the conviction, 
that it cannot in tins world, with all its sorrows 
and its vicissitudes, continue for ever. 

That uninterrupted life in this world could not 
be the blessing it seems is proved by the simple 
fact, that death is inevitable to all; that it comes 
oftener to the very young than to those who have 

[11] 



12 DEATH AND LIFE. 

readied adult life ; that it interrupts us in plans 
and pursuits that seem to us of immense im- 
portance, cutting us down in the prime of our 
strength, and taking from the world those who 
are in the fulness of usefulness, as often as those 
who only cumber society with their imbecility or 
offend it with their wickedness. 

This love of life, which is so universal and so 
strong as to be an instinct rather than a mere 
passion, is one of the attributes of man, given to 
him by the Creator with life itself, and must there- 
fore be good. Why, then, does the Creator dis- 
appoint this love by what man calls premature 
death ? Why does he so often take away life from 
the happy and the virtuous in their youth, and so 
often suffer the wretched and the wicked to live on 
to extreme old age ? Or why, in truth, does he 
suffer us to die at all ? 

This brings us to the consideration of the great 
delusion under which mankind have suffered and 
groaned these many centuries, giving a reality, and 
a power not its own, to what is in truth, in great 
measure, a phantom of the imagination. Man 
weeps at death as the extinction of life, while to 
the Creator it is the unfolding; of a higher life. 
The little inmates of an infant-school, full of the 



DEATH AND LIFE. 13 

enjoyment of its lively amusements and employ- 
ments, would be troubled, if they were told every 
day, that, in a short time, they would be taken 
away from all these pleasures. The boy with his 
top and marbles and story-books thinks with pain 
of the time when he must give them up for more 
serious occupations. The girl with her dolls and 
her baby-house finds her cup of happiness full, and 
wishes she might live so always. As the mind 
expands from year to year, it asks for maturer 
enjoyments and wider fields of action ; and, in each 
step onward in life's progress, the mind, as it 
reaches forward to what lies before, quits its grasp 
on something that it leaves behind. Herein is 
something analogous to what we call death. As 
fast as the mind opens to the new, it closes to the 
old : it becomes alive to something it was un- 
conscious of before ; and dies to something, that, 
because it is outgrown, is now useless and uninter- 
esting. 

There are persons who mourn over the pleasures 
of the past, and who look upon childhood as the 
happiest period of life ; but such persons are apt 
to be those who have made little moral progress, 
and who form but a feeble estimate of the value 
and object of their existence. It is to be hoped 



14 DEATH AND LIFE. 

that the number is small of those who could be 
content with life without growth. 

When we read of the fearful plague that befell 
the Egyptians ; the death, in one night, of every 
first-born son throughout the kingdom, — it seems 
like something so remote from all our own experi- 
ence, we cannot fully realize that a nation was 
ever so afflicted. Probably no people ever existed 
so little capable as our own of even sympathiz- 
ing with such a calamity; for long-continued 
peace and prosperity have incapacitated us from 
appreciating the sufferings of less-favored races. 
Hitherto, death has come to us in its more gentle 
forms. Pestilence has been scarcely known, and 
violence has been still more rare. Now all is 
changed, and our young men are perishing daily 
by wounds, and by the pestilences of the camp, 
till we are almost like the Egyptians, with a corpse 
at every hearth-stone. 

As death has been known to us heretofore, we 
have been measurably able to look upon it as 
a visitation of Providence : but when men are 
mowed down in battle ; when our friend is at one 
moment full of life and strength, and, the next, 
stretched a helpless clod, felled down by the wrath 
of man, — we find it difficult to believe that Provi- 



DEATH AND LIFE. 15 

dence has dealt the blow. Still we know that he 
could have prevented it : therefore it must have 
fallen by his permission. 

How shall we reconcile all this carnage, permit- 
ted by our heavenly Father, with our preconceived 
ideas of his paternal love? Some way must 
be found, or there is danger that our faith may be 
shipwrecked in the billows of our despair. 

Death has for ages reigned on earth as king of 
terrors. The skull and cross-bones, ghastly in- 
signia of his power, are as familiar to every eye as 
the crown and sceptre of earthly monarchs. The 
kingdom of Christ has been proclaimed eighteen 
hundred years, with its assurance of eternal life: 
but the blind eyes of mankind have failed to open 
to its meaning ; the captives to the bondage of 
fear have been unable to comprehend the liberty 
freely offered to their acceptance. If the kingdom 
of Christ had come in its power into the hearts of 
mankind, the terrible king would have been de- 
throned long ago, and his crown and sceptre 
shattered, and crumbled into dust. 

To those who live in the bondage of this fear, 
death seems the end of life. So shadowy and ob- 
scure to them is all beyond the grave, that it has 
no definite existence to their minds : and imagina- 



16 DEATH AND LIFE. 

tion shapes only phantoms, instead of men and 
women ; and locality, without form, in place of 
the fair fields of earth. Yet, in reality, death is 
but a single point in life ; and that part of life 
which is beyond death is incomparably more vivid, 
more varied, more full of interest, than that which 
is now around us. 

We often hear the wish expressed, that life 
might be repeated in this world, with the aid of all 
the wisdom that has been gathered in its first 
experience. This is an unwise wish, whatever 
may have been the character of the life already 
passed. If the soul desires, from a sincere love of 
goodness, to lead a second life better than the first, 
this is exactly what death will enable it to do, 
with more of help and less of hinderance than it 
has enjoyed or suffered here, and with all the 
benefit of whatever wisdom it may have attained 
on earth. If, on the other hand, the soul only 
dreads to leave this world through fear of suffering 
in the other the results of an evil life, there is no 
probability that a second trial would have any 
other effect than to sink it into a still deeper abyss 
of sin. 

A true faith in the providence of God teaches 
us, that the time selected for death is that which is 



DEATH AND LIFE. 17 

best adapted to our own progress in life. We, 
as it were, graduate from this world, when we 
arrive at such a state that our future progress 
will go on more favorably in the spiritual world 
than here. 

One of the principal distinctions between the 
temporal and the eternal world is, that here all 
classes of good and evil are mixed together hetero- 
geneously, and incentives to goodness and tempta- 
tions to evil are both exerting their power upon us 
at every step. This is allowed because the end of 
life here is for us to choose, in perfect freedom, 
between good and evil ; which we could not do, 
unless exposed alike to both influences. In the 
eternal world, we are classed according to our 
characters, — like loving and seeking like ; so that 
the good are delivered from the snares of the evil, 
and the evil from the annoyance of the good : for 
each are mutually distasteful to the other. In this 
state, the progress of the good must be far more 
rapid and more agreeable, because all surrounding 
influences are in harmony with their desires ; and 
their temptations are those only that are in their 
own hearts. 

Death, the passing from the present life of 
probation and preparation to the future life of retri- 



18 DEATH AND LITE. 

button and fruition, is a abject demanding the 
utmost seriousness of thought; but there is no 
just rea on for looking upon It with sadness, in 

relation either to ournelvea or our friends, [t is 
impofl ible to believe heartily in the paternal love 
of the Almighty, and j j < > t. to believe with the apos- 
tle, tint, " to die i j gain/' Every day in the year, 
an army of* human beings pa ises from the foce of 
the earth to be swallowed u\> in eternity ; or, let us 

nil.her Hay, to he ebi.-.ped more closely than before 

in the arms of Eternal Love. Surely we cannot 

believe that thene eonneriptH are taken by chance* 
or by the divine displeasure. If God is love, 
they are taken because he wi he . to do that wliich 
i. best for them. The world has cea ed to be 
their true home; and it is time that they should 
take their places in the eternal man ions. 

[t is impossible for the finite mind to eompre- 

bend the Divine Providence that overrules the 

di po al of the lives of men. Death often teems 
to us to come prematurely , when a person is re- 
moved bom earth who e l.ihnl . promised a u:~:eful 

or brilliant career, or who i cut short in \\^- mid t 
of such a career. But the ocieties of heaven 
stand iii equal need of wisdom and the power of 
u efulness; apd the capacities that had not com- 



DEATH AND LIFE. 19 

pleted the task that seemed waiting for them here 
will find ample and endless scope in the regions of 

the future lite. 

There is a sadness attached to all gifts and en- 
dowments when looked upon in relation to this 
world only, because we know that they must grow 
dim and pass away: but. in the spiritual world, 
there is no dimness nor death but that which is the 
result of sin : and all that is heavenly there be- 
comes brighter and more perfect through the eter- 
nal ages. Xo soul will be there misplaced, no 
faculty unemployed : and the growth in knowledge 
and in wisdom will know no end. In those wider 
fields of activity and of progress, the soul must 
rind continual cause for rejoicing, and must look 
back to the hinderanoes, and the imperfect freedom 
of this life, as to a state of childhood, to which it 
feels no inclination to return. 

The freedom of the future life is a blessing of 
much interest and value. In this world we are 
hedged about by circumstances, in a way that 
hinders us from doing as we would. Our social 
position, our opportunities of culture, our physi- 
cal health, and many other limitations, press upon 
us, and often infringe upon our liberty. We may 
be free in thought and feeling in this world : but. 



20 DEATH AND LIFE. 

in the external manifestations of thought and feel- 
ing, few persons possess a freedom that is any- 
thing more than nominal. 

Swedenborg tells us, that the heavenly Father 
guards our internal freedom with great care, be- 
cause we are responsible only so far as we are 
free. Whoever examines his own mind with fair- 
ness must be compelled to acknowledge, that his 
thoughts and feelings are free ; that he is at liber- 
ty to love or hate, and to hold any form of opinion, 
precisely as seems to him good. The expression 
of his loves and hates, and of his opinions, is a 
different thing ; because, if they are unlike those of 
his associates, he may have a thousand motives for 
concealing them, and even for assuming to hold 
very different ones from those which are really his. 
Hence come many varieties, more or less culpable, 
of concealment, subterfuge, insincerity, and hypoc- 
risy. 

The bondage of voluntary sin we are all able to 
avoid, if we will : but living in social and family 
relations with those who differ from us so much 
that we can only live in peace by often practising 
silence when we would gladly speak, and by 
many forms of external compliance that annoy and 
trouble us, is a bondage from which no one can 



DEATH AND LIFE. 21 

escape entirely ; which presses on many painfully, 
and on some so as to make life itself a weariness, 
or even an almost insupportable burden. 

The " many mansions " of the future life remove 
from us all these sources of annoyance and trou- 
ble, and give us the truest freedom. Classed as 
society is there, by like seeking and joining itself 
to like, family and social sympathy become the 
rule, instead of the exception ; and each one is 
helped on in the way he would go, by the support 
that sympathy gives. 

Heaven is a world of sincerity, where love to 
the Lord and to the neighbor are the dominant 
impulses of every soul. In such a home, there 
can be no fear but that of doing wrong ; and this is 
the liberty wherewith the Lord makes his children 
free. 

In heaven, all are not equally sincere, nor do all 
equally love the Lord and the neighbor ; but no 
one can find a place there, unless the love of truth 
and the desire of goodness underlie the other loves 
and desires of his heart. 

It has been a question in many minds, how the 
good and the evil can be separated with justice 
into the two regions of heaven and hell ; because it 
has seemed to them, that in classing the human 



22 DEATH AND LIFE. 

race, although it would be very easy to place the 
very good and the very wicked in their appropri- 
ate homes, those who were less marked in charac- 
ter could hardly deserve heaven or hell ; and, 
when it came to those who were least good and 
least evil, the difference between the two would be 
almost nothing, while the difference in their desti- 
nies would be infinite. The difference that sepa- 
rates the good from the evil is something much 
more positive than persons who reason in this way 
suppose. In the good, the love of the Lord and 
the neighbor predominates over the love of self 
and of the world ; while, in the evil, the opposite 
is the case. Although the difference in external 
life, between many of these two classes, may be 
quite inappreciable to human observation, they are, 
in fact, walking away from each other, and their 
paths can never cross or approach each other. 
To the omniscient Eye this is at once apparent, 
and judgment belongs to the omniscient Mind 
alone. The justice of this judgment is made 
apparent to all, in the future life, because all 
are there left in freedom to choose their final 
abode. 

When the soul quits its material body, it enters 
the world of spirits, which is a region between 



DEATH AND LIFE. 23 

heaven and hell. It is there received kindly by- 
good spirits, who, by their sympathy and instruc- 
tion, endeavor to place the new-comer at ease, and 
to attract him into the society of other good spirits. 
If his dominant loves are good, he remains with 
the good spirits, and is gradually prepared to enter 
heaven : if his desires are bad, or if they are less 
advanced in goodness than those of the spirits with 
w T hom he is first placed, he turns away from them, 
and others of a lower order present themselves. 
This continues until he finds himself with those 
who are agreeable to him. If he prefers the socie- 
ty of the evil, he joins himself to them; and, as 
soon as he has made his choice, he passes of his 
own accord to the mansions appropriate to his own 
loves and desires. There is no external compul- 
sion in all this, but simply a free expression, in 
outward act, of the principles which govern the 
internal life. 

The mansions of the spiritual world are mani- 
fold as the minds of the spirits who dwell in them. 
In this world our homes represent, in some degree, 
the minds of those who dwell in them ; but this 
resemblance is, with most persons, limited in vari- 
ous ways by external hinderances. In the spiritual 
world, the external corresponds spontaneously with 



24 DEATH AND LIFE. 

the internal. Not only the countenance and the 
person, but the dress, the house, and the garden, 
are the exponents of the soul that possesses them ; 
and, as the soul changes from period to period, the 
things that surround it change also. Thus sin- 
cerity is the law, not only of the human soul in the 
spiritual world, but of that world itself. To com- 
plete the heavenly harmony, the occupations of the 
future life are adapted, with multifarious variety, 
to the capacities and talents of every soul ; and 
each is appointed to perform the work for which 
he is best fitted. 

Happiness or misery is thus, simply, the direct 
consequence of the goodness or the wickedness of 
the soul, and not the arbitrary reward or punish- 
ment awarded by the Almighty. He does not 
desire the misery of any living creature, and per- 
mits all to be as happy as they are capable of 
being, and to be as free as they can be, without 
doing harm to themselves or others. The liberty 
of no one is restrained in doing good ; but they 
who would do evil to those who are about them 
are restrained. 

It has been stated above, that all may avoid, 
if they will, the bondage of voluntary sin in this 
world ; but, in the most degraded classes of socie- 






DEATH AND LIFE. 25 

ty, there is a great deal of what seems to be sin 
incurred by those who have not liberty of choice. 
Little children are corrupted by wicked parents, 
and educated to habitual evil ; and, having no 
knowledge of God or of religion, they are uncon- 
scious of their own immorality. Under such cir- 
cumstances, human beings are not responsible ; and 
their evil deeds are not attributed to them as sins, 
any more than good deeds would be attributed to 
them for righteousness, when done only by com- 
pulsion. It is that only which we assume from 
voluntary choice, whether good or evil, that is 
truly ours. It is easj^ to perceive the futility of 
a life of merely external, formal goodness ; and a 
little reflection will enable us to perceive, that 
a life of merely external, formal wickedness is just 
as futile. Such goodness does the soul no good, 
and such wickedness does the soul no harm. They 
are both as external to the soul as the clothes are 
to the body. 

When a human being who has lived a life of 
involuntary sin passes into the other life, he is 
'like a new-born child. His spiritual capacities 
have never been opened on earth ; and he wakes as 
from a long animal sleep, and becomes a spiritual 
being. Good angels minister to his ignorance, 

2 



26 DEATH AND LIFE. 

and he then first begins to be an accountable being ; 
because he is then, for the first time, free to choose 
between good and evil. 

Thus, with the Almighty, justice and mercy are 
one. No exercise of arbitrary power drives from 
his presence any soul that desires to remain near 
to him ; and no soul is made incapable of this de- 
desire through any influence of circumstance beyond 
its own control. His power is equalled by his 
love, and seeks to make itself known and felt by 
the perpetual exercise of love. The salvation of 
the souls he has created is the whole end and aim 
of his providence in this world and in the next. 
It is God who worketh within us, both to will and 
to do of his good pleasure, when we strive, with 
fear and trembling, to work out our own salva- 
tion. 

In the Scriptures, the terms w salvation " and 
w condemnation " are used as synonymous with life 
and death. To live is to be with God ; to die is to 
be separated from him. Such life is called the king- 
dom of heaven, and is typified by various figures, 
in the teachings of the Lord to his disciples. It 
is the pearl of great price, the treasure hid in a 
field, the one thing needful. It is something so 
valuable, that we are wise to sell all that we 



DEATH AND LIFE. 27 

have in order to obtain it. There is no danger 
that we shall love that life too well ; and, the 
more we love it, the less we shall fear the death of 
the material body. It is but a small thing to part 
with life in this world, if we have the assurance of 
unending life in the world to come. 

Everlasting life is what mankind desire above all 
else, — desire with fear and trembling ; and there 
is nothing that can be looked forward to which is 
so terrible as everlasting death. How shall we 
obtain the one, and how escape from the other? 

The Lord tells us, w Verily, verily, I say unto 
you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on 
Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall 
not come into condemnation, but is passed from 
death unto life." And again he says, "He that 
believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he 
that believeth not the Son shall not see life." 

The promise, it should be observed, is not of 
something beyond the grave, but now, in the 
world of time and space. He that believeth is not 
to have eternal life by and by in a future state, 
but hath it here and now. For him material 
death has no terror, and to him spiritual death 
cannot come. What, then, is that saving belief so 
important for us all ? 



28 DEATH AND LIFE. 

To believe in the Son, and on Hini who sent 
him, is to feel that he is the one perfect realization 
and source of all goodness and all truth ; to feel 
that his love for us is such, that we must love him 
in return ; and that the o»ly way in which we can 
testify our love for him is by loving our neighbor 
as ourselves. These two great commandments 
comprise the whole law of eternal life, covering 
the whole ground of piety and morality, faith 
and works. 

This is something very easy to say, but very dif- 
ficult to attain ; for we must sell all that we have, 
before we can begin to lay up treasure in heaven. 
Many live lives of external goodness like the young 
man in the Gospel ; but, like him, are full of the 
complacency of spiritual pride, trusting that their 
vast possessions of good works will suffice to pay 
for the pearl of great price. When the truth is 
presented to their minds, that all goodness belongs 
to God, and that they must give up all trust in 
their own goodness if they would attain to eternal 
life, they are filled with disappointment and sor- 
row. Then they perceive the force of the Lord's 
words : " It is easier for a camel to go through the 
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into 
the kingdom of God." Nothing can indeed be 



DEATH AXD LIFE. 



29 



more impossible than for the human soul to be- 
come regenerate, so long as it trusts in the riches 
of its own good works. God alone has strength 
to lift us out of this falsehood ; and he can do it, 
only when Ave cease to trust in ourselves, and, 
humbling ourselves before him, confide in the 
saving power of his wisdom and his love. 




MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 



&£9j^|^yf«£fc»v *%£* 




The creature could never lament the dispensations of the Creator, 
if he understood them: therefore the measure of our grief is also the- 
measure of our ignorance. 






■ > ■» Its' ^ ^ 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 



ffi%OW shall we mourn for the dead? Shall 




we mourn as if they had indeed ceased to 
live, or as if they had passed on before us 
into a higher and more perfected life? Shall we, 
like unbelieving Jews, roll great stones upon the 
graves of our friends, as if we dreaded lest per- 
chance their bodies might escape from earth ? And 
shall we weep over those stones, as if they indeed 
imprisoned all that remained to us of our friends ? 
or shall we pray that the heavenly powers may aid 
us to roll away the stones of unbelief that imprison 
our own spiritual perceptions : and, turning from 
the material memorials of our friends, seek to feel 
their presence in the fan places of earth, where we 
take pleasure. — in the homes, where we enjoyed 
their companionship ? 

2* [33] 



34 MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 

Sensual grief may be of use to a sensual mind. 
Mourning garments, funereal pomp, elaborate mon- 
uments, may give comfort and a certain kind of 
consolation to such minds ; may, perhaps, induce 
a seriousness of thought that would not otherwise 
be attained : but it can hardly be possible that 
genuine Christian faith could seek or find any 
thing to satisfy its demands, in the hour of be- 
reavement, in external emblems of grief, that 
bind the soul to earth, and hinder its upward 
aspirations. 

Among the tombs that have been uncovered in 
the long-hidden city of Pompeii, there is one which 
has carved upon it a vessel just anchored, and the 
seamen furling the sails. It would be difficult to 
find a truer image whereby to represent the Chris- 
tian idea of what we call death. Eternity is often 
compared to the ocean ; and the ending of our little 
life here, to a stream lost in ocean's immensity. 
There is a forlorn wretchedness in such a compari- 
son, that should give it the He at once in a Chris- 
tian mind. The soul's individuality is lost in it ; 
and we feel ourselves homeless as the mind wan- 
ders over the unmeasured vastness. 

I remember once driving along the sea-shore in 
the neighborhood of a maritime city, when a great 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 35 

ship came sweeping majestically along the waters, 
and glided peacefully to its anchorage. " There," 
said my companion, " is a vessel that has been in 
the Pacific more than three years." I shall never 
forget the thrill that passed through me as he 
spoke. Imagination at once pictured the joy of 
those who were returning from their weary voyage, 
and the delight of those who had been so long 
waiting for them at home. I could have shouted 
a welcome to them, though they were all stran- 
gers ; and I envied those who had a claim to give 
them a friend's greeting. Here w r as a true picture 
of a Christian soul, its voyage of this w r orld's life 
over, anchoring in the heavenly home. Home to 
the homeless, rest to the weary, peace to the sor- 
rowful, are all implied in the word " death ; " and 
yet we shroud it with gloom, and typify it with the 
revolting representations of fleshless bones. True, 
there are wrecks on life's ocean, voyages that ter- 
minate in despair ; but, as a general rule, it is the 
termination of the happiest voyage of life that we 
look upon most tearfully, w T hile we are easily recon- 
ciled to the close of one that is worthless. There 
is, apparently, as little just appreciation of the rela- 
tions and the value of life and death, in the minds 
of most persons, as there would be of voyages in 



36 MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 

one who should weep at seeing a noble ship come 
home in safety, and smile when a wreck was 
dashed upon the shore. 

It seems to me that the feelings of joy and wel- 
come which naturally arise in the human soul at 
the sight of a long-absent ship coming safely into 
port must typify the emotions of the inhabitants 
of heaven, when they look upon the spirits who 
are newly arrived from earth. To us who are left 
behind, there must naturally be sadness for our 
loss, when those we love pass before us to their 
eternal home : but a Christian faith must teach us 
that such feelings are purely selfish ; and that, in 
cherishing them, we are sinning against Him who 
brought life and immortality to light. 

The Jew, who has no assurance of an existence 
beyond the grave ; the Pagan, who is ignorant of 
the paternal love of the divine Creator, — may well 
grieve as one who has no hope, when he sees the 
eyes of his loved ones closed in their last sleep : 
but, if the Christian refuses to be comforted, his 
Christianity must be an external faith, and not an 
internal affection. If we believe that the heavenly 
Father does not suffer a sparrow to fall to the 
ground contrary to his will, we cannot believe 
that a human life is less tenderly cared for. We 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 37 

cannot, then, feel that death is more premature 
when it comes to the infant of days than to the 
old man of many years, or that it is less under 
the divine control in the strife of battle than in 
the peace of home. 

The early Christians recognized the new aspect 
which the knowledge of immortality gave to the 
death of the body ; and they soon ceased to use 
the signs of mourning for the dead, that, till then, 
had been universal. They felt that it was wrong 
to mourn for the dead ; and their epitaphs in the 
Roman catacombs still testify to the peaceful trust 
and the hopeful assurance that animated the minds 
of those who there deposited the mortal remains, 
often sealed with the blood of martyrdom, of those 
they held most dear. Among the thousands of 
inscriptions still' to be read there, there is no allu- 
sion to be found to the grief of those who were 
left to perform the last offices for their friends. 
No inconsolable relatives immortalize their tears 
on those walls. The simplicity of a childlike faith, 
that to die here was to live in the mansions of the 
all-loving Father, seems to have been the abound- 
ing source whence flowed the countless phrases 
that speak of death always as good rather than 
evil. The bad Latin in which many of the in- 



38 MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 

scriptions are couched proves that a large propor- 
tion of the dead were of the lower and little edu- 
cated classes ; but all ranks seem to have been 
animated by the same spirit. Selfish grief finds 
no expression there ; and the historians tell us, 
that all signs of mourning in dress were deemed 
unfitting in those who believed in the Christian 
immortality. 

How long this childlike faith in the new revela- 
tion lasted, we do not know : but Protestantism, 
with its frightful doctrines of election, predestina- 
tion, and the vindictive wrath of God, was certain- 
ly sufficient to crush out all that might have been 
left of it in the more cheerful faith of Rome ; and 
modern fashion, with its lugubrious ensigns of 
crape and bombazine, steadfastly testifies how 
much the sensuous still predominates in the views 
of death held by society at the present day. 

The scientific niceness of the laws which control 
the time and the manner of mourning, from its 
first midnight blackness through its gradual shad- 
ing-offinto slate and gray, has so ludicrous a side, 
that the pen of the satirist and the pencil of the 
caricaturist find abundant scope for their talent 
in delineating the shifts and subterfuges of which 
hypocrisy makes use to simulate a grief it does 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 39 

not feel. True affection, like true piety, may ask, 
w Why should my neighbor's hypocrisy influence 
me to refrain from doing honestly what he does 
dishonestly ? " But, if this be really a sign of grief, 
what has fashion to do with it ? If we are just as 
earnest that our mourning-hat shall be becoming, 
and in the newest mode, as if it were a ball-room 
costume, does it not show that the mourning is 
but a secondary matter? that it is custom and 
fashion to which we yield, and not grief, when we 
put on our sable robes ? There are fashions which 
have no moral relations, which are merely harm- 
less conventionalisms ; but there are others which 
involve principles, and which, if those principles 
be wrong, we cannot follow, and be faithful to our 
duty. The wearing of mourning for the dead, if 
mourning for the dead be wrong, is a striking ex- 
ample of such a fashion. Until within a few years, 
this was a universal custom : but of late, in many 
of the rural districts, it has gone much out of 
favor ; and close mourning is now a fashion of the 
town rather than a custom of the land. Still, 
most persons make some change in their costume 
when a death occurs in the family circle ; and 
many of those who refrain from the external sign 
of mourning do so because they look upon it as 



40 MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 

an extravagant fashion, which should be discour- 
aged by those who can afford it, so that those who 
cannot may feel that they can abstain from it 
without being thought wanting in respect for the 
Memory of their friends. This is a good motive ; 
but it is far from being the best motive. 

The wearing of mourning is one of the fashions 
that have a decidedly moral bearing, and is there- 
fore one that should not be followed merely be- 
cause it is the fashion, and because persons in our 
particular set will be offended if we fail to adopt 
it. Nor should we refrain from wearing it merely 
because we think our example may influence others. 
Merely external reasons should not control us, be- 
cause this is not a merely external fashion. It has 
a moral cause and a moral influence ; and therefore 
the adopting it or the not adopting it should be 
decided in accordance with the principles of a true 
morality. 

The custom of wearing mourning is one that we 
share in common with all races and all ages ; and 
it results from the common horror mankind enter- 
tain for death. It is essentially an unchristian 
custom ; for one of the grand distinctions of Chris- 
tianity is, that it presents an entirely new view of 
death. 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 41 

The Heathen and the Jew, with whom the life 
after death is a fearful uncertainty, and death itself 
a terrible leap into darkness, must mourn with a 
bitterness that can have little to soften it, when 
the insatiable grave snatches from them those 
whom they love ; when their friends depart they 
know not whither, perchance to lie in the cold 
earth until the last trump shall sound ; perchance 
to lose all personality in a resurrection that shall 
re-absorb them into the Power that created them ; 
perchance to wander for ever in regions so unlike 
any thing we can enjoy here, that it is beyond the 
power of human capacity really to believe in 
enjoyment there. All this ignorance and uncer- 
tainty make it quite excusable in the Heathen and 
the Jew to mourn, and to carry the signs of 
mourning to almost any extent ; to tear the hair, 
to cut the flesh, to cover the head with ashes. 
The advance of civilization has caused these bar- 
baric signs of grief to give place to something less 
repulsive, although the grief itself seems little 
changed in character. To disfigure the person is 
no longer deemed necessary in order to show our 
respect for the memory of the dead. Provided the 
hue and the material be right, the milliner and 
the dressmaker may shape the sombre emblems of 



42 MOUKNING FOR THE DEAD. 

woe as becomingly as possible ; and personal vani- 
ty may find as satisfactory food in crape and bom- 
bazine as in the gayer colors and lighter fabrics. 
Hence no class of the community mourns so 
deeply in dress as the one that prides itself upon 
being of the highest elegance, and which holds nice 
taste in costume to be a cardinal virtue. 

A country lady, on entering a fashionable city 
church, is more struck by the number of ladies in 
close mourning than by any other difference she 
sees from what she is accustomed to at home. 
She says, perhaps, to herself, " \Ye are wiser in 
this respect, in the country, than the dwellers in the 
town." Still, the difference is one of fashion, and 
not of principle. The city ladies wear black, as 
they wear every thing else, more in extreme than 
country ladies. So long as the heathenism of 
mourning is not recognized, they who put on only 
a little stand on the same plane as those who put 
on much. The difference is one of degree, and not 
of kind. 

The moral cause for wearing mourning is the 
want of a distinct and enlightened faith in the life 
after death. That the dead rise was clearly 
taught by the Lord, and is believed, or said to be 
believed, by every one who accepts him as a divine 






MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 43 

teacher ; but after what manner they rise was left 
to be reasoned out by Christians, in accordance 
with the light each one possessed. Consequently, 
theories of a future life are as various as the minds 
that form them ; and the whole subject is looked 
upon as a matter of theory, and not of faith. 

About a century ago, a book was published by 
Swedenborg, called w Heaven and Hell," in which, 
for the first time, that which seems to many minds 
a perfectly logical theory of the future life was 
taught, and one, at the same time, harmonizing 
entirely with all that the Scriptures teach us of the 
character and providence of God. This book has 
been a great source of comfort to many persons 
who have never accepted Swedenborg as an au- 
thorized teacher, and who receive the doctrines it 
contains, only in the same way that they would re- 
ceive the writings of any wise man whose thoughts 
recommended themselves to their spiritual needs. 
To those who accepted the peculiar claims of Swe- 
denborg, the truths he taught in relation to the 
future life came with a power that compelled them 
to acknowledge that grief for the so-called dead 
was a selfish passion, which it was the duty of a 
Christian to resist and put away. This being ac- 
knowledged, it followed, that, if the grief were 



44 MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 

wrong, it was wrong to wear the outward symbols 
of grief, because they helped to nourish the grief 
itself, and to make the recovery from it more diffi- 
cult. They generally, therefore, abandoned the 
custom. To persons not of their faith, this may 
seem a merely negative peculiarity ; but there is 
something more, something deeper, in their refusal 
to follow the fashion of the world in this particu- 
lar. 

Believing, as they do, that the infinite love of 
the heavenly Father never allows a human being 
to pass away from the natural world until the best 
possible time for his entering the spiritual world 
has come, death never appears to them a prema- 
ture event ; and possessing a faith in the spiritual 
realities of the other life, built upon what they 
consider a knowledge of the principles by which 
that life is arranged and governed, death cannot 
be to them that indefinable object of terror which 
it is to those who see nothing but doubt and dark- 
ness beyond the grave. Divested of any faith in 
that far-off judgment-day, when the whole human 
race, roused by the last trump, shall gather up the 
poor disintegrated particles of their material frames, 
and present themselves before a judgment throne 
to receive their eternal sentence ; when all shall 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 45 

long for heaven, but vast multitudes be sent away 
to an eternity of torment, — divested of this faith, 
they look forward to an existence beyond the grave, 
commencing w r hen the soul ceases to animate the 
body ; where no one goes into the life of hell but 
they who have no love for the life of heaven ; 
where each one seeks out in freedom a mansion 
adapted to the affections of his individual life ; in 
which, if he be evil, he will be controlled, so that 
his evil may not impinge upon the freedom of his 
fellows ; and, if he be good, he will go on, through 
an eternity of joyful progress, in a life that shall 
perpetually assimilate him more and more to the 
divine perfection. With a clear and fixed faith in 
such doctrines, the dying pass away without ex- 
citement and without fear ; while those who are left 
behind feel that the time when their friends are 
putting on the garments of salvation is not the 
time for them to put on the weeds of woe. 

To feel no sorrow that our friends have left us 
is not to be expected of imperfect humanity. We 
cannot keep our minds so filled with thoughts of 
the brighter fate of those who have gone before us, 
that our hearts will not be sorrowful, or our eyes 
unmoistened, at the memory of our own loss ; but 
can it be right, can it be any thing but selfish- 



46 MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 

ness, if we abandon ourselves to grief, if we nour- 
ish it by surrounding ourselves with every external 
sign of woe? Are we not putting ourselves in 
opposition to Providence ? and have we any right 
to look to Heaven for strength to bear our be- 
reavements, if we meet them with a belief that it is 
a virtue in us to cultivate the sense that they are 
bereavements ? 

The sting of death is sin. If our friends have 
lived and died in sin, we may well mourn for them 
while they live and when they die ; but such 
mourning would naturally conceal itself within the 
most secret recesses of the heart. If, on the con- 
trary, we have a blessed assurance that our friends 
have lived and died in the service of the Lord, let 
us lift up our hearts in thanksgivings that they 
have gone where the soul's life cannot change its 
direction, but will go on for ever in the life of 
grace. Let us be drawn heavenward more and 
more as the band of friends grows more nume- 
rous that awaits us beyond the silent portal ; and 
let us believe, with a lively faith, that that portal 
opens, not into death, but into life that knows 
neither disease nor decay nor end. Let us muse 
upon the blessedness of that life until a holy flame 
of love shall burn within our hearts, until heaven- 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 47 

ly light shall illumine our inward eye ; and then 
let us forbear from disfiguring our countenances 
with sorrow, as though grief were a meritorious 
passion ; and let us not shroud our persons in a 
raiment appropriate only as an expression of grief 
that knows no consolation. 

The extreme to which the ornamentation of 
burial-places is often carried is another fashion 
that has a tendency to interfere with a true view 
of death. If the dead are risen, why should we 
linger with impassioned fondness about the spot 
where the soul's cast-off garment lies mouldering ? 
It may be said that this is but a harmless senti- 
mentalism ; but it involves much more than that. 

It is hardly possible that one who has a clear, 
undoubting faith in the spiritual existence of a 
departed friend, can cling with fondness to the 
worn-out clothing of that friend's mortality. Such 
an indulgence of the natural feelings must tend to 
materialize the mind, and to prevent a living faith 
in the present, conscious existence of those we 
mourn. It must prolong the state of mourning 
in the mind, and impede our growth into that 
state of acquiescence to the Divine Will which 
alone can give us true peace in the contemplation 
of our bereavement. They have forgotten their 



48 MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 

material bodies : why should we love to remember 
them ? They cannot come down to us in our ma- 
terialism ; but we may lift ourselves toward them 
by elevating our minds into a true spiritualism. 

Departed souls are affected by the state of mind 
of those whom they have left behind them, though 
they are as unable to perceive our material bodies 
as we are to perceive their spiritual ones. The 
spiritual sympathy between those who have left 
this world and those who remain in it, must be 
interrupted and hindered, if one party be ab- 
sorbed or deeply affected by something that is out 
of the sphere of the other. Our friends, we cer- 
tainly hope, are risen into a happy home, freed 
from disease and material disturbances of every 
sort, and beginning a course of spiritual growth 
higher and purer than any thing that could have 
been attained in this world. They have gradu- 
ated, as it were, from this lower, preparatory 
school, because the time had come when it was 
best for them to go up higher. They still love us, 
and sympathize with us, and long to help us to 
come up where they are. Can this love and this 
sympathy be answered to by us, if, while they are 
being initiated into those higher pursuits and joys, 
we are absorbed in the choosing and shaping of 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 49 

garments by which to show how sorry we are 
that our friends are so lifted up ; or if we are 
haunting, with tearful eyes, the spot where their 
poor earthly remains lie buried ? Is it rational to 
suppose that they can come to us, and console us 
with their love, if we indulge in moods of mind so 
far removed from theirs? Or, if they try to do 
so, can it fail to mar their happiness in their 
blessed home? If they strive to linger near us, 
must it not hold them back in their upward course, 
if we persist in looking downward? Christian 
love should make us strive to keep near to our 
friends by our spiritual elevation, that we may 
grow with them, and help them to grow, by sym- 
pathizing with them, so far as we can, in the new 
state upon which they have entered. It must 
needs be that they still turn toward us with affec- 
tion ; and mutual sympathy in heavenly aspirations 
must mutually strengthen and uphold those aspi- 
rations. If we insist upon clinging to all of our 
friends that belonged to earth ; if we dwell with 
morbid wilfulness upon all that we have lost, and 
delight in testifying to our grief by all the material 
signs that dress and sculpture can supply, visiting 
the tomb as if our friend really rested there, — we 
can hardly fail to materialize our views of death 

3 



50 MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 

and of the life after death. By the homage we 
offer to the dead body of our friend, we may 
diminish our spiritual consciousness of that friend's 
now living existence. 

" They are not here, they are risen," is the 
appropriate motto for our burial-places ; and those 
inspired words should be so written on our memo- 
ries, that they may lift our hearts upward when- 
ever we find ourselves clinging mournfully to ma- 
terial memorials or emblems, that can only chain 
our thoughts to earth. 

Angels rolled away the stone that only seemed 
to imprison the body of the Lord : let us not pile 
monuments above the bodies of our friends, as if 
we would indeed hold them in bonds. 

The barren spots, fertile only in thorns and 
briers, that have been given over to the dead in 
many places, lack decency, and are unseemly; 
but, to a Christian eye, a burial-place given over 
to ostentatious display can hardly be more attrac- 
tive. Heathenism seems to w reign in triumph 
here." 

Modern times have yet to learn what a truly 
Christian burial-place should be. Not a place so 
poor, that it should seem as if the avarice of the 
living grudged room for the decent disposal of 



MOURNING FOR THE DEAD. 51 

the bodies of the dead ; nor yet so fine as to offer 
a hideous contrast to the decay It covers. 

Pride and ostentation meet us everywhere while 
we live in this world : but let us at least hope that 
the day may come, even on earth, when a puri- 
fied Christian taste may learn to perceive that 
simplicity should reign in the burial-place, if no- 
where else ; that humility, though little admired 
elsewhere, is at least becoming at the grave. 







MEMORY IN THE FUTUEE LIFE. 






" Those things which absolutely enter into the life, and become 
spontaneous, and, as it were, natural, vanish out of the external 
memory, but remain inscribed on the internal memory, whence they 
are never blotted out. 

" Heavenly and spiritual love give an orderly arrangement to all 
things belonging to the exterior memory ; whereas self-love and the 
love of the world prevent order, and confuse all things. 

" The interior mind of man looks into the things of the natural 
memory ; and those things there which confirm divine truths, it sub- 
limates, as it were, by the fire of heavenly love, and withdraws them 
and purifies them, till they become spiritual ideas." — Swedenboeg. 








JUEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 



S^^IIAT shall we remember of this life, when 




we enter upon that which is to come ? is 
a question that often forces itself upon 
the mind ; sometimes asked by our hopes, when 
we dread to lose out of the memory that which 
we love to dwell upon ; and sometimes by our 
fears, when we tremble lest we may never forget 
tilings that we can remember only with pain or 
remorse. 

Memory is a vast storehouse, filled with the 
most varied possessions. To some persons it is a 
fair mansion, inhabited by beautiful forms, and 
vocal with sweet melodies. To others it is a 
charnel, haunted by grim spectres and discordant 
sounds. Yet there is probably no one who has 
not something there he would gladly forget, and 

[55] 



56 MEMORY IK THE FUTURE LIFE. 

much that he would wish always to remember. 
To forget the past entirely, would seem little less 
than losing one's identity ; yet most, if not all of 
us, would shrink from remembering it entirely. 

The annals of medical and moral science go far 
towards proving, that what is once written upon 
the pages of memory is never erased ; for the 
delirium of fever, or the excitement of violent 
emotion, is known to awaken in the mind the 
memory of things that no voluntary effort could 
have recalled, in a state of health or tranquillity. 

Many instances are on record, of persons, who, 
under the excitement of the fear of sudden death 
by drowning or other violent cause, relate, that, 
in a few seconds of time, the memory of their 
whole past lives, even in minute, detail, passed 
through their minds so rapidly as to make seconds 
seem hours. There is a story related by Coleridge, 
and believed to be well authenticated, of a woman 
who could not read, but who, in the delirium of 
fever, repeated correctly long passages from He- 
brew, Greek, and Latin authors, which she had 
heard read years before by a scholar, as he walked 
to and fro in a passage-way of his house, having a 
door opening into the kitchen where she was a ser- 
vant. A still more striking proof of the perma- 



MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 57 

nence of all impressions made upon the memory 
has been recorded by the principal of one of the 
schools for the training of idiots. A little girl, 
seven years old, was brought to him in a state so 
idiotic, that she had never spoken. Under his 
tuition, she learned to talk ; and, after remaining 
with him three years, she returned home to visit 
her family ; when, to their surprise, she recognized, 
and called by name, not only all the members of 
her own family, but all the neighbors who had 
been in the habit of coming to the house, but of 
whom sheiiad never been supposed to take any 
notice. 

Such facts as these make it difficult for us to 
doubt that all impressions made upon the memory 
are absolutely indelible. If the dulness of idiocy 
and the indifference of ignorance are so impressi- 
ble, we can hardly refuse to believe that the 
memory of every human being retains, so long as 
life lasts in this world, every tiling that has once 
been* written there. 

What effect death may have upon the memory 
is still an unanswered question in the minds of 
most persons ; and, to those who possess a genuine 
faith in another life, it must be a question of deep 
interest. The intellect asks it, as it contemplates 



58 MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LITE. 

the stores of knowledge it has garnered, and would 
gladly carry away into a wider sphere and increase 
for ever. The affections ask it, longing to believe 
that the friendships and the loves that have en- 
riched life here may be renewed and perfected in 
the life to come. Remorse asks it, longing to 
forget ; and grief asks it, fearing it may remember. 

The unsatisfying reply usually given to such 
questions is, that we must trust in the mercy of 
the Lord, that all will be ordered for our best 
good and highest happiness ; and that it is unwise 
in us to trouble our minds with questions that can- 
not be answered. 

It would be difficult to find any question of 
mental or moral philosophy which has not an 
answer in the writings of Swedenborg ; and me- 
mory is an object of especial consideration in them, 
in its relations both with this life and with the life 
to come. He tells us that memory is twofold, — 
external and internal. To the external memory 
belong all the facts of the material life, considered 
merely as facts, — its events, its daily cares and 
employments, its science, its art, and its literature. 
To the internal memory belong the results of all 
those facts which have impressed themselves upon 
the mind so as to become part and parcel of the 



MEMORY IX THE FUTURE LIFE. 59 

Hritual being. The internal memory is the 
r book of life," on the pages of which are written 
ae results of all that we love and think and do 
rhile we live in the natural world. The external 
facts of this life, considered merely as facts, have 
no permanent interest or value. Their worth lies 
wholly in the effects they have produced upon the 
character. These effects build up our spiritual 
body as food and drink build up the natural body, 
and form it into the image and likeness of the 
master whom we choose to serve. 

The function of memory in the mind corre- 
sponds to that of the stomach in the body. The 
stomach is a place of deposit for the material food, 
and there it is digested ; and then what is appro- 
priate to the system is assimilated to its various 
tissues and organs, and what is inappropriate is 
rejected and thrown aside. In proportion as the 
food is wholesome, taken in proper quantities, and 
well digested, the body is filled with life and health 
and strength. If, on the contrary, the food be 
unwholesome or imperfectly digested, the body is 
filled with disease. If too much be taken, the 
system is clogged and encumbered in its functions ; 
if too little, the strength is wasted, and the body 
pines away. 



60 MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 

The memory performs for the spiritual body a 
use precisely corresponding to that which the 
stomach performs for the natural body. It fur- 
nishes a storehouse for all the mental food ; and 
the use which this food subserves depends on the 
power of digestion and of assimilation possessed 
by the spiritual body. 

Closely connected with the function of digestion 
is that of appetite ; and this depends on the health 
and the habits of the body. It may be deficient 
or unnatural from weakness or disease ; or too 
great, and craving unwholesome substances, from 
a habit of over-eating, and disregard to the laws of 
health. A body that is healthy, and that has been 
habituated to act upon the principle, that food and 
drink are the daily bread for which we pray, and 
which is provided by the Lord to strengthen it for 
the performance of its daily duties, will desire only 
such food as is wholesome, and will be content 
when enough has been taken to satisfy hunger. A 
body that is unhealthy, or that has been suffered to 
acquire habits of gluttony and intemperance, is 
subject to desire unwholesome food, and to eat and 
drink for sensual gratification, without caring for 
the use which food was designed to subserve. All 
these states of the natural body have their corre- 



MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 61 

sponding ones in the spiritual body ; and the 
one is built up by assimilating spiritual food, just 
as the other by assimilating natural food. A 
mental appetite, hungering for the bread which 
cometh down from heaven, is the sure index of 
a spiritual body, healthy in all its functions and 
habits. 

By the bread which cometh down from heaven 
is not meant direct religious instruction only. 
Every branch of knowledge that we leaven with 
the divine truth becomes heavenly bread to us ; 
while the word of God, as it is given to us direct- 
ly in the Sacred Scriptures, is not heavenly bread 
for us, if we read it unworthily. 

When we study the sciences that illustrate the 
world around us, belie vins; that this world was 
fashioned by the hand of God for our instruction, 
illustrating by correspondences the truths that be- 
long to the spiritual world, the sciences become 
heavenly bread to us. When we study history, 
believing that the Divine Providence is over all its 
events, and that the fate of nations illustrates for 
us the development of the human soul, both col- 
lectively and individually, we make heavenly bread 
of history. When we study mental philosophy, 
seeking to understand the workings of the human 



62 MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 

mind in order better to subdue our own passions, 
and so bring our whole being into subjection to the 
laws of the divine Creator, philosophy is heavenly 
bread for our souls. When we study the Sacred 
Scriptures that we may learn the commandments 
of our heavenly Father in order to do and teach 
them, the Scriptures become the veritable bread 
of life to us. 

Every one of these branches of instruction is 
capable of being desecrated by our pride and 
worldliness, so that it may become deadly poison to 
the spiritual body, and the Bible more than all 
others ; because that which is in itself most holy, 
becomes, when desecrated, the most harmful. 
When the love of self and of the world rules in the 
mind, instruction is sought only that it may min- 
ister to our pride and self-complacency. Then the 
memory becomes a fountain of disease, pouring its 
poison into all the members of the spiritual body ; 
and, the more it is filled, the lower must the soul 
sink in the scale of spiritual being. 

The facts and truths we learn in our intellectual 
studies, so far as they are merely such, belong to 
the external memory, and are forgotten when we 
put off the material body ; but the results we gain 
from them, when we study them with a view to 



MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 63 

their relations with the spiritual world and with 
our own souls, belong to the internal memory, and 
abide with us for ever. 

In like manner, the events of the daily life, that 
belong only to the external nature, live only in the 
external memory. What we eat and drink, and 
wherewithal we are clothed, to-day, have their own 
importance while this day lasts ; but to-morrow 
we shall have no need to recall them to memory. 
So far as they were adapted to our healthful nour- 
ishment and protection, our food and clothing of 
yesterday make our bodies vigorous in their func- 
tions to-day. The more perfectly they were thus 
adapted, the less we think about them afterwards ; 
for the healthy body forgets itself. It is only when 
the functions are imperfectly performed that we 
are reminded of our bodies. Then the time has 
come when we should recollect what we have done 
wrong, in order to avoid the same mistake in 
future ; or what natural wrong tendency there is 
in our constitution, that we may take measures to 
reform it. 

So in our spiritual bodies : just in proportion as 
we do our work faithfully every day, we shall for- 
get the past, and refrain from the endeavor to 
anticipate the future. We never have so little 



64 MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 

self-consciousness as when we are doing our duty- 
most faithfully. Socrates seems to have recognized 
this truth : for he says his attendant genius never 
said any thing to him so long as he did that which 
was right ; but, so soon as he began to do any- 
thing wrong, she reminded him of his delin- 
quency. 

Our spiritual body of to-day is formed out of 
the affections and thoughts and actions of our past 
life ; but we remember each of these very imper- 
fectly. Our spiritual body is healthful in propor- 
tion as we have been faithful to the law of the 
Lord; and, the more healthful it is, the less we think 
about it. When we have done wrong, remorse 
torments us with the memory of our sin ; but the 
innocent actions of our lives pass out from the ex- 
ternal memory, to be built into the organs and 
tissues of the spiritual body, filling us with heavenly- 
happiness, which is the consequence of a heaven- 
ly life. 

When the material body dies, the external memo- 
ry becomes gradually quiescent ; and the internal 
memory, which is the "book of life," becomes 
more vividly active than it ever was during its 
existence in this world. The memory of merely 
external events and actions falls asleep ; while the 



MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE 65 

memory of all things that have become wrought 
into our spiritual being stands out distinctly in the 
mind, not to be gainsaid or forgotten. 

If we look upon the internal memory as the 
book of our lives, the pages of which are to stand 
through eternity, inscribed with what we have 
written there, it becomes a question of the deepest 
interest what we shall write upon those pages, and 
how we shall write it. 

The memory takes in every thing that is pre- 
sented to it through the senses, bad and good. In 
the daily commerce of life, it has little freedom of 
choice as to what it shall receive ; but it has a 
choice as to what it will digest, and assimilate to 
itself. We hear things and see things that fill us 
with disgust and loathing, and make us feel as if 
our spiritual body had been poisoned by an impure 
contagion : but we mistake in this ; for it is only 
the external memory that has been touched. The 
spiritual body is harmed only by the evil that we 
love ; for it is only love that digests and assimilates 
what lies in the memory, and so makes it a constitu- 
ent part of our being. What we remember with 
aversion cannot be written in the book of our life. 

In so much of the daily intercourse of society as 
is beyond our control, we are not responsible for 



66 MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 



what our memories receive ; but in that intercourse 
which is of our own seeking, and in the books we 
read, it is quite otherwise. In these, we are volun- 
tarily giving food to the memory. In these, we 
select what we love ; and this will be transferred to 
the internal memory, and so become part of the 
spiritual body which is to live for ever. If what 
we thus select is impure, the contagion is a defile- 
ment to the soul ; and the soiled pages of our book 
of life will bear the testimony of our degrada- 
tion. 

With a still firmer hand, we are making our 
entries on these enduring pages in all that we say 
and do. The external life is the embodiment of 
all that we love ; and, so long as we love them, the 
journal of our words and actions will stand unef- 
faced. Every thing that we truly repent of is sup- 
pressed in the memory when we die ; but all that 
we love is distinctly written there for ever. It is 
not enough, that, when we suppose death is ap- 
proaching, we start back in terror from the 
recollection of our past lives, because we fear 
the consequences they may bring upon us in the 
life to come. Fear is not repentance ; and remorse 
that springs only from fear has no power to efface 
the memory of our sins. They will cling to us 



MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 67 

until we learn to hate them, because we love the 
Lord ; and then they will pass away, never more to 
return, unless the love of evil that produced them 
comes back into the heart. Grief for sin that has 
been truly repented of belongs exclusively to the 
external memory. It will remain with us as a 
warning, to keep us on our guard while we remain 
in this world : for, when we have once fallen into 
the commission of any sin, we are liable to fall 
again ; because wrong-doing impairs the strength 
of the soul, and it is never safe for us to forget the 
weakness of a member that has once sinned. 

In the material body, a wound or broken bone, 
a sprained muscle, or congestion of a vital organ, 
leaves the affected part permanently weakened ; 
and fatigue, debility, or exposure to severities 
of heat or cold, brings back painful symptoms, 
reminding us that the integrity of the body is im- 
paired. 

AYe do not enter the future life perfect beings, 
even the best of those who dwell on earth ; but 
that life is one of eternal progress in the direction 
in which we have walked while here. Therefore 
there must still be struggle with self, and sorrow 
for the evil we feel within our hearts, in the other 
world, similar to that which we feel in this. But 



68 MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 

those who have truly begun the regenerate life 
never fall into the commission of sinful actions 
after they enter the eternal world. So far as they 
are not perfectly established in the regenerate life, 
they may be tempted to commit the same evils in 
the other world that they were liable to in this : 
but they never fall there ; because, the moment that 
an evil desire rises in the heart, it is provided of 
the Lord that the external memory should awaken, 
and the sins of the past life start up, spectre-like, 
before the mind's eye ; and in humility, and anguish 
of remorse, the soul turns for protection against 
itself to the Father, who is an ever-present help to 
those who seek him. 

Shall we recognize the friends who have gone 
before us into the spiritual world ? Most certainly 
we shall. The affections that form the enjoyment 
of our present life will continue with us when we 
entejr the other, just as vividly as ever. There is 
no loss of identity, nor of any of the thoughts and 
affections that go to make up identity, in passing 
through the portal that separates the material from 
the spiritual world. The first impulse of the 
spirit, when it becomes aware that it has passed 
out from the material body, is usually to seek for 
the relatives and friends who had preceded it. At 



MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 69 

first, there is a pleasure experienced in these re- 
newals of friendship, similar to what was felt on 
earth ; but the permanency of attachments in the 
future life depends upon the absolute character- 
istics of the soul, far more than it does in this 
world. Here we understand each other very im- 
perfectly, and are liable to form incorrect estimates 
of each other. Here w r e are often deceived by 
external appearances, and so may form friendships 
on mistaken judgments of those with whom we 
associate. In the future life, we know each other 
much more perfectly, and can never be deceived so 
far as to mistake good for evil, or evil for good, if 
we really love goodness ourselves, and desire, in 
our search after it, to be led by the Lord. Friend- 
ship in the future life is based on similarity of 
moral purpose. A good spirit, therefore, cannot 
love an evil one ; neither can an evil spirit love a 
good one. Many friendships are formed in this 
life between the good and the evil : but, though 
they are renewed in the other life, they are not 
continued ; for the two parties to such a friendship, 
when they perceive each other as they actually are, 
stripped of all the external veils of worldly con- 
ventionalities, soon feel a mutual repulsion, and no 
longer desire to continue friends. This is not only 



70 MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE, 

so in friendship, but in the love of all the family- 
relations. Every tie of misplaced affection is 
gradually and gently but surely broken, whether 
it be of friendship, kindred, or love. There is no 
force of superior power exerted in these separa- 
tions ; but they are effected by the natural repulsion 
that must exist between good and evil when each 
is distinctly manifest. 

When a good person knowingly and wilfully 
forms a friendship in this life with an evil person, 
as is sometimes the case, it is much more difficult 
and painful for a separation to take place between 
the parties, and the progress of the good spirit is 
much retarded ; for, in such a case, there is an 
evil internal to the friendship which is very difficult 
to overcome : but, where the good form friendships 
with the evil through mistaken judgment, the sepa- 
ration is comparatively easy and painless. 

The natural mind may shrink from the idea, that 
brother and sister, parent and child, can forget the 
tie of blood, and cease from loving each other ; 
but, in the great household of heaven, we may per- 
ceive that a relationship must exist higher than 
that of blood, though parallel with it. What blood 
is to the natural body, affection is to the spiritual 
body ; and, in the spiritual life, all relationship 



MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 71 

must depend on similarity of affection. If this 
does not exist within the love that we feel for our 
kindred on earth, that love will gradually die out 
in the spiritual world, and be replaced by some- 
thing higher and more true. In heaven, all personal 
affection must be founded on love to the heavenly 
Father. In heaven, there is but one parent ; and 
all who enter there are the children of one family. 
We need not forget there the ties of blood that 
bound us to each other here ; but we shall value 
them less selfishly, less narrowly, in the great fra- 
ternity of heaven. 

The most absorbing affection of which the human 
heart is capable, which we are told must supersede 
all other earthly ties, and which is used in Scrip- 
ture to typify the connection between the Lord and 
the Church, is subject to the same laws that govern 
the relations of friendship and family. If it be 
founded on the merely external and temporal uses 
and conventionalities of society, it ceases with the 
life of this world. To those who look upon it 
only as a means of selfish and worldly enjoyment 
or aggrandizement, the Lord says now, as to the 
Sadducees of old, "In the resurrection they neither 
marry nor are given in marriage." The angels of 
heaven can know no such connection. The mar- 



72 



MEMORY IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 



riage union of eternity is perfect and harmonious 
as that which exists between the heart and the 
lungs, between the right eye or hand and the left. 
Each party seeks the good of the other, finding 
therein its own most perfect happiness ; and both 
look ever towards the Lord, as the source of every 
capacity for goodness, and its consequent blessed- 
ness and peace. This union is personal as one's 
own identity, eternal as the existence of the soul. 




^^c&^^^x^®^ 



SPIRITUALISM. 




" Woe unto the foolish prophets that follow their own spirit, and 
have seen nothing! 

" They have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The Lord 
saith; and the Lord hath not sent them." — Ezekiel. 




SPIRITUALISM. 




O many bereaved hearts find consolation in 
the communications obtained through the 
various signs and sounds of mediums, 
that it seems to be a legitimate subject of reli- 
gious inquiry, how far such communications are 
worthy of credit, and what place they should take 
among the sources of consolation and instruction 
vouchsafed to us by Providence. 

Scientific men may tell us scornfully, that there 
are no facts, and religious men may tell us indig- 
nantly that there is no truth, in the Spiritualism of 
the present day ; but, still, men and women will 
throng in crowds to the mediums, and will believe 
that what they see is fact, and that what they hear 
is truth. 

The universality of a faith in a spiritual Creator 
of the material world, and of a spiritual existence 

[75] 



76 SPIRITUALISM. 

for man after the material life ceases, has always 
been regarded as a strong presumptive evidence 
that such things really are. Still, materially- 
minded men have been found in all ages, who were 
ready to deny both these articles of faith. 

That spirits who have left the body have power 
to communicate with spirits still inhabiting the 
body, is a belief, that, until very recently, was 
quite as universal as the other two ; and is now 
denied only in communities that have become en- 
lightened by scientific truth. Educated persons 
are inclined to shrink from any acknowledgment of 
the possibility, that spirit may in any way make 
itself manifest to the senses of men and women 
living in this world, as if it were something shame- 
ful, and implying gross ignorance and superstition. 

Much of this incredulity is assumed through 
dread of ridicule ; and many believe in their hearts, 
while they deny with their lips. Too many in- 
instances of preternatural communications are 
authentically recorded in history and biography, 
too many are handed down orally in families living 
around us, to allow of any thing like universal dis- 
belief. The most determined deniers are men of 
science ; but it may be reasonably doubted, whe- 
ther devoting one's mental powers exclusively to 



SPIRITUALISM. 77 

the study of the material creation is the best way 
of illuminating it in spiritual things. All can see 
the folly of the pope, who had studied only spir- 
itual things, when he undertook to decide that the 
assertion of Galileo was false ; but Galileo would 
have been as foolish as the pope, if he had assumed 
that he could measure the powers and capacities of 
spirits, because he could prove that the earth moved 
round the sun. 

It is easy for us to see that it must have been a 
superstitious age, when many innocent victims 
were hurried out of the world by violent and cruel 
means, because the clergy were allowed to decide 
upon evidence in matters of life and death, which 
by no means came within their vocation ; but future 
generations may see as easily, that it must have 
been a sceptical age, when men of science were 
deemed the best judges of spiritual things, and an 
age devoted to materialism as no age ever was 
before. 

Modern scientific discovery has advanced so 
rapidly, and accumulated facts so fast, that the 
attention of intelligent minds has been called to 
the material world more strongly than at any pre- 
vious period of history ; and it is not surprising 
that the material world should for a time occupy 



78 SPIRITUALISM. 

an unduly elevated place, and attract an unduly 
exclusive attention. Still, the spirit will resist the 
reign of matter ; and the uncultivated majority will 
not submit to have its so-called superstitions torn 
from its grasp. Not that all cultivated minds are 
sceptical, and all ignorant ones superstitious ; for 
there are beautiful exceptions to the scepticism of 
science, and fearful exceptions to the superstition 
of ignorance : but, taken as a whole, it can hardly 
be denied, that the average tendency of science is 
towards scepticism, and the average tendency of 
ignorance is towards superstition. 

The so-called Spiritualism of the present day 
has grown so rapidly, since its first beginning, a 
very few years ago, at Rochester, that thinking 
minds can hardly abstain from giving some heed 
to it. When a form of religious faith counts its 
votaries by millions, it may be doubted if a truly 
religious mind should be excused for ignoring it, 
or setting it aside as jugglery or superstition, with- 
out first examining its claims with considerable 
care. That we have a religious belief of our own, 
which satisfies our faith and our affections, may 
suffice to set our own minds at rest concerning the 
claims of any new form of faith : but we cannot 
stand alone in this world; and the relations we 



SPIRITUALISM. 79 

bear to society call upon us to take some decided 
ground in regard to a belief which is either a cor- 
rupting superstition, or the opening of a new mode 
of intercourse with the world of spirits. If it be 
the latter, we may desire to become acquainted 
with it for our own sakes ; if the former, we should 
endeavor to comprehend it so far as to be able to 
aid others who are liable to be led away by it, or 
who have already given themselves up to its mis- 
guiding influence. 

Probably there is no religious denomination, 
taken as a whole, who have given so little heed to 
Spiritualism as the class of persons who belong 
to the New- Jerusalem Church, or, as they are 
more commonly designated by others, Swedenbor- 
gians ; and yet the members of this church form 
the only class of Christians who believe that inter- 
course with spirits is perfectly possible, and in no 
way discordant with the laws of nature or the 
powers of man. 

The discoveries of modern science have, one 
after another, brought their tribute of evidence, 
each in its own form, to prove the truth of the 
philosophy and the theology revealed to the world 
through the instrumentality of Swedenborg ; and 
now Spiritualism, with its lofty flights of fancy 



80 SPIRITUALISM. 

and its puerile depths of folly, with its elevated 
morality and its low hypocrisy and falsehood, forms 
a heterogeneous whole precisely in accordance 
with what Swedenborg tells us of the inhabitants 
of the " world of spirits," or middle country be- 
tween heaven and hell, where the spirits of the 
departed go on first leaving the world of matter, 
and before taking their final places in heaven 
or hell. 

Many persons seem to think, that, if any thing is 
preternatural, it must be supernatural ; that, if any 
thing comes to us from the region of spirits, it 
must be pure and true, holy and dignified. Be- 
cause many so-called spirits are found liars, they 
decide that the whole thing must be false : for, if 
it came from heaven, it must be all true ; and they 
are sure God would allow nothing to come to us 
from hell. Others, after a careful examination, 
finding it impossible to escape from the evidence 
of preternatural power, decide, that, because much 
is false and evil, the whole thing must come from 
hell. 

The doctrines taught by Swedenborg place us 
upon a middle ground, where we can answer the 
objections on both sides, and give a rational solu- 
tion of the whole phenomena of Spiritualism. 



SPIRITUALISM. 81 

According to those doctrines, the spiritual world is 
divided into three regions, — the world of angels, 
or heaven ; the world of spirits ; and the world of 
devils, or hell. All spirits, immediately upon 
leaving their material bodies, pass into the second 
of these regions, and there remain until they are 
made thoroughly to understand themselves, and to 
decide of their own free will whether they will 
choose heaven or hell for their final abode ; for 
man is not promoted to heaven nor cast down to 
hell by the arbitrary judgment of the Almighty. 
His own thoughts and affections pass judgment 
upon him, and by them he is led to choose a home 
with spirits like himself. If his thoughts and 
affections are heavenly, they lead him naturally 
to desire and enjoy the society of angels ; while, to 
those whose thoughts and affections are infernal, 
such society would be a grievous bondage, and 
they flee away from all that is heavenly, and find 
themselves at home only in the regions of hell. 
The duration of the residence of spirits in this 
middle country is very various. Those who have 
been very good or very evil in this world go soonest 
to their final homes ; while those whose characters 
have been less marked, and who do not readily 

learn to know the dominant inclinations of their 

4.* 



82 SPIRITUALISM. 

own natures, remain sometimes for many years 
before they are able to acknowledge to themselves 
the ruling loves which were dominant with them 
in the flesh, and which must remain dominant when 
the flesh is cast off: for, in this world, we all make 
our final choice of the direction in which we shall 
walk through all eternity ; though, with many, the 
life seems so vacillating and uncertain, that, to finite 
perceptions, it may appear that there is as great an 
inclination in one direction as in the other. 

The inhabitants of this middle region are the 
only spirits who can readily hold direct intercourse 
with persons still living in this world. The spirits 
who are in heaven or hell are too far removed in 
the plane of their life from us to be able to make 
themselves manifest to us, excepting in very rare 
and peculiar instances. These spirits are as varied 
in character now as they were before they left this 
world. They awoke in the other life possessed of 
just the same affections as when they fell asleep 
for the last time here ; neither wiser nor better for 
having passed through the gate of physical death. 
They have been admitted neither to heaven nor 
hell, and are incompetent to instruct us about 
either. A little reflection might lead us to suppose 
that it would be those spirits who are least capable 



SPIRITUALISM. 83 

of Instructing who would be most ready to take 
upon themselves the office of instructors. Recently- 
departed from this world, and as yet knowing 
little of the world into which they have entered, 
the candid, the humble, and the truly wise, would 
feel that they were incompetent to instruct those 
they had left behind them ; while the superficial, 
the conceited, and the talkative would be all ready 
to hold forth to whomsoever would listen. Pride 
and conceit, and love of dominion, that led them to 
delight in influencing others while in the flesh, 
continue to make them delight in exercising a still 
stronger influence, now that they are in the spirit, 
upon those who are still in this world ; and who 
suppose them to be more competent to instruct, 
merely because they have gone to a world to them 
unseen. The love of gossip, too, so intense in 
many who are around us, cannot become annihi- 
lated by the change of abode ; but must and the 
keenest enjoyment in bewildering the minds of 
inquisitive men and women, who receive any news 
from the other world, however stale and unprofita- 
ble, with open-eyed wonder. Swedenborg tells 
us, that evil spirits especially delight in exercising 
power over others ; that, when they approach a 
person, they perceive whatever is in his memory, 



84 SPIRITUALISM, 



and are thereby able to exert an influence over him 
of which they would otherwise be incapable. This 
agrees with one feature that is constantly observed 
in the spiritual communications of the present time. 
So surprising a knowledge of things in the mind 
of the questioner is often shown, that faith is at 
once enlisted to believe any thing the spirit may 
assert. By thus, as it were, compelling the faith, 
and destroying the rational liberty of the mind, 
the spirits prove themselves evil ; for no good 
spirit wishes to compel faith, but desires, like the 
Lord, to leave us all in rational liberty. Spirits 
who strive to destroy the liberty of the mind are 
Jesuitical and diabolical. 

Again : Swedenborg says that evil spirits are 
very fond of assuming to be some great person, or 
some person other than they really are, as the case 
may be, in order that their words may exert a 
stronger influence on those to whom they speak. 
Judge Edmonds, with an amusing simplicity, relates 
that the spirits told him, that, finding men were 
more ready to ask who they were than what they 
had to say, they assumed such names as they 
thought would carry weight with them, in order to 
make people more ready to receive what they 
wished to tell them. It does not seem to occur to 



SPIRITUALISM. 85 

the mind of Judge Edmonds, that the spirits who 
assumed to be Swedenborg and Lord Bacon were 
playing him the same trick; although there was 
nothing in what they said that could have enabled 
a reader to tell which was which, had it not been 
for the signatures ; or that would have led him to 
imagine that any great mind was uttering itself, 
unless the most long-winded verbosity be a sign of 
greatness. 

The communications that have been published to 
the world exhibit an amount of wisdom not at all 
above the average of what w r e find in persons 
dwelling about us ; and this is precisely what we 
have a right to expect, if we assume Swedenborg's 
doctrines to be true. There is no department of 
literature at the present day more flat, unphilo- 
sophical, and unworthy of notice, than that of the 
published spiritual communications that have been 
given to the world. The more intelligent votaries 
of Spiritualism assure us, that we should not judge 
of the subject by its printed literature ; for the most 
interesting; and valuable communications have never 
been published, but are scattered about the coun- 
try in manuscripts that the possessors esteem far 
too sacred to permit them to meet the public eye. 
It is very probable that the owners of these writ- 



86 SPIRITUALISM. 

ings value them thus highly, but exceedingly 
improbable that they are really so valuable. Manu- 
scripts, especially those in which we have a per- 
sonal interest, generally seem more precious than 
published compositions ; and, if these papers were 
all given to the world, it is probable that the 
average amount of wisdom they contain would 
vary little from that of which the public has al- 
ready been permitted to judge. 

Many will naturally be led to ask, why the 
communications received through Swedenborg 
should be esteemed any more worthy of credit than 
those of other mediums. The manner in which he 
was instructed was entirely distinct from any thing 
that has been done since his day. The instruction 
received by the spiritualists comes to them from 
spirits who are pressing into the material world, 
eager to display the knowledge they possess, and 
seeking to take possession of men's minds, and 
compel their faith by astonishing them with the 
tricks of jugglers and fortune-tellers. 

Swedenborg, on the contrary, was elevated by 
the Lord into the spiritual world. His spiritual 
perceptions were opened after the manner of St. 
Paul, and he saw and heard what was passing in 
the spiritual world. 



SPIRITUALISM. 87 

The mediums are like persons, who, wishing to 
know about England, should approach its coast, 
and think to acquire a knowledge of its geography, 
its institutions, and its customs, by talking with the 
pilots, fishermen, or land-sharks, who came off to 
them in boats. Swedenborg is like a man who 
has spent years in traversing England in every 
direction ; in conversing with its people of every 
class ; in studying its laws and customs, its arts 
and sciences, its mineral, vegetable, and animal 
productions. 

The spiritualists give us disjointed, fragmentary 
information of the most contradictory character, 
much of it puerile, and much in direct opposition 
to the Scriptures. Swedenborg gives us an 
elevated, logical, coherent system, harmonizing 
perfectly with itself, with science, and with revela- 
tion. 

Swedenborg gives us no doctrine on the authority 
of any spirit or angel, but received all the doc- 
trines he teaches by direct illumination from the 
Lord while reading the Holy Scriptures. The 
relations of things heard and seen in the spiritual 
world, interspersing most of his works, illustrate 
the doctrines, but do not in any case originate 
them. 



88 SPIRITUALISM. 

The undignified modes by which the spirits 
manifest themselves is often brought forward as a 
reason for disbelieving that what is done is the 
work of spirits : but dignity is by no means a 
common trait in the beings who dwell on earth ; 
and there is no reason for supposing that passing 
into the world of spirits induces dignity. It would 
certainly destroy the identity of a vast multitude of 
human beings who go hence, if this noble trait 
of character should be at once bestowed upon them. 
If we take the only rational presumption, — which 
is, that we rise up in the world of spirits with exactly 
the same human soul with which we lie down in 
the world of matter, — we see at once, that the 
communications, both in manner and matter, are 
just what we have a right to expect ; just as con- 
ceited, just as commonplace, just as gossiping, just 
as puerile, as they naturally would be, coming 
from spirits slow to learn, but eager to teach ; un- 
willing to listen, but eager to talk. Spirits who 
are really wise have something better to do than to 
spend their time in gratifying the idle curiosity of 
anybody who is ready to give a dollar that he may 
spend an hour in talking with them. The readi- 
ness with which they play into the hands of those 
who would thrive by their means, and who are 



SPIRITUALISM. 89 

ready to add all manner of tricks of their own to 
those which the spirits can perform to amuse the 
curious, is sufficient proof of their belonging to a 
very low order of beings. The most zealous fol- 
lowers of the spirits are compelled to acknowledge 
a large proportion of them to be egregious liars ; 
but still they are lured on to believe every thing 
the spirits may utter which they cannot disprove, 
and which pleases their credulity. 

The efforts that have been made to prove that 
public mediums are impostors have had a surpris- 
ingly slight effect upon the public mind. In 
various cities, the most gross deception has been 
proved upon persons following this vocation ; and 
doubtless there are some, who, in consequence, 
turn away in disgust, and abandon the pursuit of 
information obtained by such means. Still, Spir- 
itualism increases, year by year and month by 
month, with a rapidity even greater than that of 
Mormonism. 

The whole mode of operation by public mediums 
seems to be arranged for deception ; and it is not 
probable that any one who exhibits in public can 
long retain honesty. Intelligent and honest private 
mediums exhibit a power in the broadest daylight, 
incomparably more surprising than the feats per- 



90 SPIRITUALISM. 

formed in darkness by the public mediums ; and as 
different in character, also, as daylight is from 
darkness. The private medium has not the tempta- 
tion to deceive that the public one must have. 
The facility with which communications can be 
obtained depends very much on the state of health 
of the medium, and on various other causes, some 
known and some unknown. If the medium exerts 
his power in private, and without pecuniary reward, 
he feels at liberty to confess at any time, that he is 
not in a state to use his power ; but if he makes 
it a matter of emolument, even in private circles, 
and, still more, if he undertakes to operate before a 
public audience, he is often tempted to pretend to 
put himself in communication when the power is 
wanting, and to blind the eyes of spectators by 
tricks, and mislead their minds by subterfuges, 
when he can give them nothing genuine. 

In the Scriptures, all appeals to spirits, for any 
purpose, are constantly classed as a sin with idola- 
try ; and it is always asserted or implied, that, 
when we turn ourselves towards spirits, we turn 
ourselves away from God. Thus, in Deut. xviii. 
10 — 12, we read: "There shall not be found 
among you any one that maketh his son or his 
daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth 



SPIRITUALISM. 91 

divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, 
or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter of familiar 
spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer ; for all 
that do these things are an abomination unto the 
Lord." 

In the enumeration of the sins of Manasseh, 
2 Kings xxi. 5, 6, it is stated that he built altars 
for all the host of heaven, and used enchantments, 
and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards. Again : 
in 2 Kings xxiii. 24, we are told in praise of 
Josiah, that he put away familiar spirits and 
wizards and images and idols, and all the abomi- 
nations that were spied in the land. In Isa. xix. 3, 
we find the same classification of those who M seek 
to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that 
have familiar spirits, and to the wizards." In Le- 
viticus, these same sins are classed together, and 
forbidden ; with the reason appended, " for I am 
the Lord your God." 

These passages all cohere as one, and plainly 
indicate that the seeking after preternatural know- 
ledge, such as might be obtained from any other 
sources than those appointed by God, is, in fact, 
turning away from him. He has given us the 
Scriptures, and has manifested himself person- 
ally for the instruction of his children in doctrine 



92 SPIRITUALISM. 

and in life ; and, if we seek after knowledge by 
climbing up some other way, we do it with the 
assurance that we are committing an abomination 
in the sight of our God. 

It is a singular feature in the religion of the pre- 
sent day, that the authority of the Bible is not 
considered of the slightest weight in proving the 
possibility of spiritual intercourse, by a large pro- 
portion of persons who assume to be Christian 
believers. To quote its words in an argument 
upon the subject, is to provoke a cavil or a sneer or 
a self-complacent smile, that seems to say, "How 
can you be so credulous as to consider commands 
of any authority that I have so entirely out- 
grown ? " 

It has been asserted in regard to these texts, 
that the obtaining access to the spirits must be im- 
possible, or it would not have been forbidden; 
because there could be no harm in it. The novelty 
and ingenuity of this reasoning is worthy of all 
admiration. That a sin should be forbidden us 
because we cannot commit it, is a mode of legisla- 
tion so curious, that it could have occurred to 
none but a subtle reasoner to have ventured upon 
the suggestion. It may be asked, why this pro- 
hibition should be classed apart from all others ? — 



SPIRITUALISM. 93 

Why, when we certainly are able to commit, and 
very liable to wish to commit, all other acts pro- 
hibited in the Scriptures, this alone is to be torn 
from its connection, and set by itself as an impos- 
sible sin? 

A little observation of the effect produced upon 
the mind by intercourse of this sort would be 
sufficient to show why it was deemed necessary 
that it should be forbidden. We are placed upon 
this earth in order that we may become prepared 
for heaven ; and the spiritualism of Swedenborg 
teaches us, that to esteem the means of moral pro- 
gress and culture, which the world affords us, of 
little worth, is to undervalue the only means by 
which regeneration can be obtained. The faithful 
performance of the duties set before us here by our 
heavenly Father is the only way in which we can 
fit ourselves for performing the heavenly duties 
that await us in the world hereafter. 

The state of mind produced by seeking after the 
wisdom of the spirits is adverse to the perform- 
ance of the common duties of life. The mind is 
filled with curiosity, and is continually seeking to 
gratify it by appealing to the spirits : and, the more 
constant the intercourse becomes, the less willing 
is the mind to turn itself towards temporal tilings, 



94 SPIRITUALISM. 

and to see in them the stepping-stones to a higher 
life. It is a received doctrine with the spiritual- 
ists, that, to become a good medium, it is necessary 
to withdraw one's self from intercourse with the 
world as much as possible, and live in a sort of 
ascetic retirement, free from material care. Swe- 
denborg tells us, that this mode of life induces a 
state of nervous excitement, that renders one sus- 
ceptible to the influences of a fantastic class of 
spirits, who are sure to mislead all who trust to 
them. 

Some men who take up arms against Spiritual- 
ism start from the position, that it is impossible for 
spirit to manifest itself in any way to mortals. 
They seize upon certain things done by spiritualists 
which they can imitate, and cry out, w This is no- 
thing ; we can all do it ! " but take not the slightest 
notice of the things done which they cannot imi- 
tate. Such ex-parte evidence against a criminal 
would be driven from our courts of justice with 
opprobrium : but any thing seems to them suffi- 
cient to convict a medium of falsehood ; and, if one 
medium is false, they assume that all mediums 
must be the same. Probably nine-tenths of the 
feats performed by public mediums are mere tricks 
for obtaining money, and have nothing to do with 






SPIRITUALISM. 95 

any spiritual being ; but there is a class of facts 
developed in private, by mediums who are among 
the purest minds in the country, which can be 
explained by none of the theories that have as yet 
been offered, and which admit of no explanation 
but a spiritual one. 

The question is often asked, how it can be possi- 
ble that the Almighty would permit evil and 
dangerous spirits to come back to earth, and use 
their influence to the detriment of the souls of 
those who seek them. There seems to be a good 
deal of confusion in the minds of many persons 
regarding what God permits and what he approves. 
Thus they think he would not permit spiritual in- 
tercourse, unless he approved it. Yet we all know 
that he permits the earth to be infested with every 
form of sin ; and we know as well, that he disap- 
proves it far more than we do. He desires to give 
us entire liberty ; and it is this liberty that con- 
stitutes us responsible beings. If we are not 
entirely free to choose between good and evil, we 
cannot be justly accountable for what we do. 
The objector would again, perhaps, ask how it can 
be that he permits this new mode of intercourse 
between this world and that to come for no useful 
end. To this the New Church replies, that spir- 



96 SPIRITUALISM. 

itual intercourse is not a new thing ; that it has 
existed, in some form or other, ever since the world 
began. While the Scriptures were received as the 
absolute word of God, the Jewish and the Chris- 
tian churches both recognized two distinct modes 
of this intercourse, — one holy and sacred, which 
came to mortals without their seeking, and which 
constituted them seers and prophets for the bene- 
fit of the Church ; the other, impure and selfish, 
sought out by the individual for his own benefit, 
or for the gratification of his curiosity, which the 
Church regarded as a sin, and the State punished 
as a crime. Rationalism and materialism at length 
became dominant : every thing spiritual was driven 
so far off from the minds of men, that, for a while, 
all voluntary turning towards the objective reality 
of the world of spirits ceased ; although extraor- 
dinary dreams and visions have continued to occur 
often enough to prevent the entire loss of faith in 
a spiritual world among the great body of the 
people. At length, the pendulum having swung 
to the utmost limit the minds of men could bear in 
one direction, it swings back as far the other way. 
All legal restraints being removed, men and wo- 
men rush madly, by thousands, to seek the spirits ; 
and the low and impure spirits, who are near 



SPIRITUALISM. 97 

enough to the material world to ffeel its influence 
with sufficient power, come willingly to meet them. 
No new principle is developed by all this, no new 
power exercised : it is only that humanity has 
suddenly taken a fancy to make use of a power 
it always possessed, but never before used with so 
much freedom. The objector urges, that he can- 
not believe the great minds that have passed away 
from earth are ready to come back, and discourse 
of the unseen world, at the call of the ignorant 
and the impure. The New Church answers, that 
when the low, the impure, and the ignorant call, 
the spirits of former mortals of the same classes 
come ; and, being shrewd enough to know that 
they would have little or no influence if they con- 
fessed their own insignificance, they claim to be 
the great ones of the earth, and so command the 
attention of listening crowds. 

How far it may be desirable to convert to Spir- 
itualism those who believe the gulf impassable that 
separates the embodied from the disembodied spirit, 
is a difficult question. The conviction that a vast 
mischief was being done by the spirits to the minds 
of many well-intentioned persons, by upsetting 
their faith in Scripture and their love for the true 
and the right, has made it seem desirable to set 

5 



98 SPIRITUALISM. 

forth some of the views of the New Church, hoping 
thereby to lend a helping hand to those who are in 
danger of falling a prey to the spirits, or who 
have already fallen, by endeavoring to show that 
they are as little to be trusted now as in the days 
of Saul or of Caesar ; that they who attempt to 
penetrate the world of spirits through human 
means are leaning upon a staff that may break, 
and pierce the hand ; and that, if we would walk 
surely and safely, we must M seek not unto them 
that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that 
peep and mutter, but unto the Lord our God." 










THE 



BUILDING-UP OF REGENERATE LIFE. 




" Pride is base, from the necessary foolishness of it ; because, at 
its best, when grounded on a just estimation of our own elevation or 
superiority above certain others, it cannot but imply that our eyes 
look downward only, and have never been raised above our own 
measure. For there is not the man so lofty in his standing or ca- 
pacity, but he must be humble in thinking of the cloud habitation 
and far sight of the angelic intelligence above him, and in perceiv- 
ing what infinity there is of things he cannot know, nor even reach 
unto, as it stands compared with that little body of things he can 
reach, and of which, nevertheless, he can altogether understand not 
one ; not to speak of that wicked and fond attributing of such excel- 
lency as he may have to himself, and thinking of it as his own get- 
ting, which is the real essence and criminality of pride." — Ruskin. 



I 




&^*Qgg$i& 



^#&s^y^ 



THE 



BUILDING-UP OF REGENERATE LIFE. 




URIOSITY seems to be the first intellec- 
tual trait that wakens into life in the 
mind of a child. The first movements 
of his intelligence are directed towards discovering 
the properties of the various objects that surround 
him : the second movement is to ascertain their 
causes. He every day sees the persons around him 
making various things, and it presently occurs to 
him that every thing must have been made by 
somebody. When he is told in regard to the ob- 
jects of nature, that they were made by God, he 
next inquires how and why God made them. As 
a general tiling, every succeeding reply that is 
given is calculated to turn his mind away from 
God, instead of leading him to recognize the cre- 
ating and sustaining power of the Almighty by 

[101] 



102 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

teaching him to feel that the Divine Presence, 
everywhere at hand, is all that we can know 
of existence, life, and growth. 

The child asks, perhaps, where the trees come 
from ; and is told that they grow out of the 
ground. Next he asks what makes the trees 
grow out of the ground. If he receive the simple 
answer, cc God makes them," he is told the sum and 
substance of all he can ever learn. Here, where 
the most illiterate begin, the most learned are 
forced to end. All that we can learn further of 
the life and growth of a tree is merely a series 
of facts in relation to the means by which the 
Almighty works ; but no one step has ever been 
taken towards understanding how life and growth 
are imparted to the inorganic substances out of 
which the tree is made. The child is probably 
told a few facts, such as he can receive, about the 
sowing of seed ; and how the moisture of the earth 
and the warmth of the sun combine to make the 
seed germinate, and send roots downward, and 
leaves upward ; and how the roots suck up moist- 
ure, which becomes sap in the plant, and feeds it, 
and makes it grow. If he have a dull mind, he 
probably rests here all his life ; and it never occurs 
to him that he does not understand all about how 



REGENERATE LIFE. 103 

plants grow. If his mind be an active one, as he 
grows older he pushes his investigations a little 
farther, and, by observation and study, finds out 
many more facts ; but they are still all on the same 
plane with those that he first learned when a child. 
They are all facts which are learned through the 
perceptive faculties, and of which he has no more 
understanding than the most ignorant clown. 

The naturalist continues his observations as far 
into the secrets of the interior construction of 
plants as the power of the microscope can carry 
him, and discovers a minute organization of cells 
and dots, which he supposes to be the earliest form 
of organic life, and finds that the plant increases 
in size by a propagation of these cells one from 
another : but still it is only a form of life, not life 
itself, he has found ; a consequence of growth, not 
its power. The naturalist, in all this investiga- 
tion, has not risen above the plane on which the 
rustic stands. His plane, it is true, is a little 
wider ; but it is no higher. His facts are all facts 
of sensuous perception ; and his having acquired 
them through a microscope in no wise elevates 
their character. 

The mother, wearied with the " hows " and the 
" whys " of her child, distracts his attention by 



104 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

showing a new plaything, or by doing something 
new with an old one ; and the child presently 
forgets what he has been asking about. So the 
naturalist, when the student asks him to explain 
the phenomena of life and growth, shows him 
beautiful diagrams of cells and dots ; and the stu- 
dent, in his admiration of the skill of the professor, 
forgets what he has been asking, and fails to 
perceive that consequences are not causes. Not 
unfrequently, the youthful student, still standing 
in the outer courts of discovered science, is heard 
flippantly declaring, that he believes nothing which 
he does not understand, when some topic of reli- 
gious faith is under discussion, unconscious that 
idiocy alone can exist in the state which he as- 
sumes for himself; for, the moment we believe 
any fact in relation to the external world, we be- 
lieve something that we do not, and that we never 
can, understand. Men more advanced in learning 
too often make this same absurd assumption : so 
that it is common to hear men of science spoken 
of as a class less religious than any other. Such 
men claim every novel fact or principle they may 
discover, with as much conceit as if it were some- 
thing of their own creation, with which the Al- 
mighty had nothing to do. 



REGENERATE LIFE. 105 

Noble examples, however, are to be found 
among the wisest men of science, and those who 
have done most to widen the fields of knowledge, 
who clearly perceive the incapacity of the human 
mind to understand the facts it discovers in the 
domain of nature ; and who, when most elevated, 
are most ready to return to the faith of the little 
child, and to believe with the whole heart that 
God is everywhere. Gravitation, instinct, life, 
and all the secret powers which narrower minds 
look upon as dead laws, perhaps created fortui- 
tously, or, if created by God, long since abandoned 
of him, and now acting of themselves, a more 
enlarged understanding perceives, can be nothing 
else save the divine Omnipotence present every- 
where, a universal Providence. 

The questions which children ask about God, 
about death, about the life after death, and about 
their own souls, are those which parents find most 
difficult to answer ; and few children get any satis- 
factory replies to their inquiries in relation to these 
topics. As they advance in life, they generally 
cease to ask them, perhaps cease to think about 
them, until they even forget that they ever thought 
of or were curious in regard to them. Parents and 
teachers commonly believe that this class of sub- 

5* 



106 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

jects is more difficult of comprehension than that 
which relates to the external world ; but the dif- 
ference between the two is one of knowledge, and 
not of understanding. We know more facts about 
the world of sense than about the world of soul ; 
therefore it is easier talking about it : but we un- 
derstand no more of the one than of the other. 

The science of religion is the soul of the science 
of matter ; and to possess the latter without the 
former is merely to possess a dead corpse. A 
dead corpse is, in an anatomical point of view, an 
object of great interest ; but it is an object of inte- 
rest only because it has been once alive, and its 
various organs were once subservient to the various 
vital functions. We study the dead body in order 
that we may know something about the living 
body ; and we should study inanimate nature in 
order to obtain light in relation to animate nature ; 
and this, again, that we may learn something about 
intellectual and moral nature. 

In all these studies, it should be borne constantly 
in mind, that all we can do is to know, and that to 
understand is something to which we do not attain 
in any department of science. The scoffer sneers 
at religious doctrines, lie says, because he cannot 
understand them ; and he supposes he is speaking 



REGENERATE LIFE. 107 

the truth. He should say that he does not accept 
religious doctrines, because he cares nothing about 
them. Truth is received just so far as it is loved, 
and no farther. Love opens and quickens the 
perceptions in whatever direction we look. The 
want of love is the only limitation to the mind's 
activity. 

It is as foolish in the man of natural science to 
6neer at the man of religious science, as for the 
theologian to sneer at the naturalist. By his vo- 
cation, if he have devoted himself exclusively to 
his own department, each has unfitted himself to 
judge of the faith of the other. A true generali- 
zation of all science shows the mutual relations 
and interdependence of the whole, and banishes all 
inclination to disdain from every mind, by teach- 
ing that he who truly learns any science must be 
taught of God. 

There are three kinds of men in the world, — 
natural men, rational men, and wise men. Truths 
also are of three lands, — truths of sensuous per- 
ception, truths of deduction, and truths of life. 
The man who receives only truths of perception is 
a natural man, the man who receives truths of 
deduction is a rational man, and the man who 
receives truths of life is a wise man. Men are 



108 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

natural and rational according to their intellectu- 
ality ; they are wise or foolish according to their 
morality : and the mode in which each individual 
pursues, receives, and applies the kind of truth 
that he loves, decides whether he be wise or 
foolish. 

There is a homely proverb, that "a fool knows 
what he knows ; but a wise man knows what he 
does not know." In other words, a wise man 
knows the limitations of his own knowledge ; while 
the fool shows his folly by striving to appear to 
know, or really thinking that he knows, that of 
which he is, in truth, ignorant. 

The distinctive difference between wisdom and 
folly lies in character, and not in ability ; in the 
morality, and not in the intellectuality. No one 
can imagine a silly angel. Folly cannot inhabit 
heaven. The foundation and the superstructure 
of folly is conceit, — the assuming to know some- 
thing of which one is ignorant. No man acts or 
talks foolishly so long as he confines his conversa- 
tion and his activity to subjects with which he is 
acquainted. 

The cobbler in the story was more knowing in 
his own vocation than the painter ; but when, 
elated by having proved the painter incorrect in 



REGENERATE LIFE. 109 

his delineation of a shoe, conceit induced him to 
criticise a point of art which he knew nothing 
about, his folly became apparent ; and the painter, 
who had just showed his own wisdom by pretend- 
ing to no knowledge of shoemaking, and submit- 
ting to be criticised by one in most respects his 
inferior, turned upon him with the merited rebuke, 
which has since passed into a proverb : w Cobbler, 
stick to thy last." 

The painter and the cobbler typify the wise and 
the foolish all the world over. None are created 
foolish ; and it is only when under the dominion 
of vanity that we become so. The fool is ever 
wise in his own conceit. Those who love the 
truth, and are willing to pass for just what they 
are, are wise, each in his own vocation. Those 
who are indifferent to the truth, and who desire to 
appear what they are not, are foolish, each by aim- 
ing to seem wise in that which is not his vocation. 

The wise man seeks instruction for its own 
sake : the foolish man seeks it for the sake of ap- 
plause. A foolish man is puffed up by what he 
knows : a w^se man is humbled by the conscious- 
ness of what he does not know. The foolish man 
is constantly looking back with self-complacency 
upon the limited fields of science he has already 



110 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

traversed : the wise man is ever looking forward 
to the boundless regions of knowledge that lie 
before him, as yet unattained. The narrowest 
intellect is wise, so long as it confines itself to 
topics with which it is really acquainted : the pro- 
foundest intellect is foolish, so soon as it attempts- 
to expatiate on things about which it is ignorant. 

The tendency of the present age is to elevate 
the material above the spirtual. Natural science 
is cultivated almost to the exclusion of moral and 
theological science. Scientific schools are rising 
up in all parts of the world, and the number of 
scientific students increasing every year ; while the 
complaint comes from the halls of philosophy and 
divinity, that the number of their votaries is every 
year diminishing. In ancient times, it was es- 
teemed disgraceful in a philosopher if he applied 
his science to any purpose of practical utility : in 
modern times, the philosopher who confines his 
investigations to the world of thought and feeling 
is looked upon with contempt, as a useless dream- 
er. Materialism invades the kingdom of the spirit ; 
and the doctrines of theology are rejected, unless 
they can be proved by mathematical formularies. 
This seems to be a natural re-action from the 
superstition and blind subservience to authority 



REGENERATE LIFE. Ill 

which preceded it. Formerly, theological science 
fulminated anathemas against natural science ; and 
now natural science takes its revenge by ignoring, 
denying, or ridiculing theological science. 

The theologic age and the scientific age are 
each equally removed from the true stand-point, 
which here, as in all lesser things, lies in the 
midst between the two extremes. Society, like 
the individual, passes through its several stages of 
growth. There is the childliood of unhesitating 
faith in the unseen and in the traditions of the 
elders ; then comes the doubting period of youth, 
when every thing must be touched and handled, 
and nothing is too sacred to be questioned ; and 
then mature age, when the seen and the unseen 
are perceived to be equally real, and equally wor- 
thy of faith, mutually dependent, and each illus- 
trative and explanatory of the other. 

The individual who never goes beyond the age 
of unquestioning faith always remains a child ; 
while he who rests permanently in a state that 
believes only what his senses tell him, though he 
has passed the period of childhood, has not become 
a man. 

There are three planes of development in the 
human mind, — the scientific, the intelligent or 



112 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

rational, and the wise or affectional. The first is 
developed by knowledge, the second by reason, 
and the third by leading a life in harmony with 
our knowledge and our reason. 

Every man who aims at success in life must 
educate himself on each of these three planes. 
By his perceptive powers, he must gather a store 
of knowledge; by his intellectual powers, he, 
must reflect upon what he knows, and draw 
from it rational principles ; and, by acting in 
harmony with these principles, he must prove 
himself wise. 

The practical man of business must do all this, 
if he would rationally hope for success. The farm- 
er, the merchant, the mechanic, must all know 
their business ; must decide by their reason what 
is the best way of pursuing it ; and then must act 
accordingly, or else they must look forward to 
failure and disgrace. So it is with the learned 
professions ; so it is with scientific pursuits. In 
all departments of life, we must know, we must 
reason, and \te must act ; and it is not till action 
has set its seal upon what we know and reason 
about, that the true quality of the character dis- 
covers itself, — that it can truly be discerned 
whether we are wise or foolish. 



REGENERATE LIFE. 113 

In order to attain to religious development, we 
must go through a similar process. God reveals 
himself to our senses in the material creation, to 
our reason in the Scriptures, and to our affections 
in the personal intercourse he holds with each one 
of us in the daily circumstances and on-goings of 
our lives. Unless we study him faithfully and 
lovingly in each of these revelations, we cannot 
arrive at a comprehensive idea of religious truth 
and duty, which will enable us to lead lives of 
Heaven-directed wisdom. 

It is a commonly received opinion, that we be- 
come religious without special study or thought ; 
by some inward working of the Holy Spirit in 
connection with the mind, we know not how ; and 
that study impedes rather than helps religious life. 
The kind of religion thus developed may be seen 
at camp-meetings and in religious revivals, so 
called, — fevers and deliriums of the mind, al- 
most always directly opposed to every thing like 
healthy, religious life. The rationalism and tran- 
scendentalism, which, in opposition to this, sap the 
foundations of religious faith among the intellect- 
ual, result from a man-worship, that seeks the 
truth in itself, or at the lips of some popular idol, 
instead of looking to the word of God. 



114 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

It is a strange, popular fallacy, that we are not 
responsible for the religious doctrines we hold ; and 
that we may adopt views, merely because they are 
pleasing to us, on subjects of all others the most 
dignified in themselves, and the most important to 
our eternal welfare. Any man would be accounted 
a simpleton, who should adopt theories, in any 
worldly science, with as little care and thought as 
most persons use in their choice of a religious 
faith. The children of this world still continue to 
be wiser in their generation than the children of 
light. To know and to understand, before at- 
tempting to do, is but a common act of prudence 
in all undertakings of a worldly nature ; and why 
should we expect to be able to lead a wise, reli- 
gious life by intuition ? We should rather follow 
up the search after religious life with fear and 
trembling, that we may not oppose the working of 
the Lord within us, which enables us to will and 
to do. The assurance that the Lord works within 
us in this matter, should not weaken, but stimu- 
late, our own endeavors ; for, if we fall dead 
weights upon his hands, we mar and interupt his 
work. We need his aid as much in the perform- 
ance of our daily duties as in the formation of our 
religious opinions ; and we should look to him for 



REGENEEATE LIFE. 115 

light, and lean upon him for support, as entirely in 
one case as in the other, but ever working ear- 
nestly ourselves. It is for the want of this faith 
in, and reliance upon, the Lord, as an ever-present 
teacher and helper, that religious opinion is so at 
loose ends, so scattered abroad, so without form 
or comeliness ; and it is from the same w r ant that 
we have so much unfaithfulness in the trades and 
professions and domestic lives of humanity. 

An artisan who really believed that the Lord's 
eye was upon him would hardly dare to do his 
w^ork unfaithfully. The merchant w^ould hardly 
dare to write a lie to his correspondent, if he be- 
lieved the Lord was looking over his shoulder. 
The lawyer would hardly pledge the powers of his 
reason and eloquence to the service of falsehood, 
if he felt that the Lord was listening to every word 
that passed his lips. The preacher could hardly 
utter rhetorical flourishes in the form of prayer, 
for the entertainment of his human audience, if he 
really believed the divine Ear was hearkening to 
his words ; or dazzle and bewilder their minds 
with flashing wit, biting sarcasm, and brilliant 
sophistry, if he felt himself to be a minister of 
God, bound to preach God's truth, and not his 
own fancies. In domestic life, too, if it were be- 



116 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

lieved that the heavenly Father stood in the midst 
of the household, parents could hardly be so care- 
less of their duties, so regardless of the conse- 
quences of their actions ; children could hardly be 
so insubordinate as we too often see them. False- 
hood, dissension, selfishness, and all the demons 
that make home other than a type of heaven, must 
vanish away before an acknowledged divine pre- 
sence. 

So long as a child is held in the faith of the 
immediate presence of a superhuman, benignant 
Being, who knows all his thoughts, and is ready to 
help him in all his troubles, it is comparatively easy 
to restrain his passions, and to subdue him to obe- 
dience. The intercourse of life soon teaches him 
to ignore this truth, as so many others do ; and 
then begins his downward course. Not until he re- 
turns to that implicit faith of his childhood through 
the absolute conviction of his reason, can he come 
into the regenerate life. Through such faith only 
can he be taught of God, and so enabled to fulfil 
God's law. 

Faith in and obedience to the one only living 
God is the burden of the teachings of the whole 
Bible. In the Old Testament, these teachings are 
enforced by hope of reward, and fear of punish- 



REGENERATE LIFE. 117 

ment. In the New Testament, in addition to 
these, we are appealed to in the name of personal 
love. His love for us being revealed, we are 
called upon in turn to love Him with the whole 
strength of heart and soul ; and this, we are told, 
is the first and greatest commandment. In direct 
opposition to this, there is a constant effort going 
on in the world so to destroy faith in a personal 
God, that there is nothing left for us to love ; 
and to keep this first and greatest commandment 
becomes impracticable. Then it is asserted, that 
the all of religious life is the keeping of the second 
commandment, — "Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself." Leigh Hunt has embodied this so- 
phistry in his elegant little poem of Abou Ben 
Adhem ; and probably no bit of moral poetry in 
the English lammao-e has been oftener or more 
approvingly quoted, during the years that have 
passed since it first appeared : yet it would be dif- 
ficulty to find any thing, pretending to virtue, which 
offers a more flat contradiction to the express 
words of Christ. Abou. Ben Adhem does not love 
the Lord ; but he loves his fellow-men so well, 
that the Lord loves him better than anybody else. 
The rational and philanthropic morality of the 
present day is simple Abou Ben Adhemism. It 



118 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

ignores God and his providence as much as possi- 
ble, and tries to satisfy its conscience by loving its 
neighbor well enough to answer for both. It 
rushes headlong into all manner of reformatory 
movements , — educational , moral , charitable , or 
political ; but, in its strivings after the great and 
the impossible, it is very apt to trample upon the 
lesser and the possible which stand in its way. It 
is so sure of its own rectitude, that it does not 
acknowledge as its neighbors those who differ in 
opinion from itself. Having no faith in a particu- 
lar Providence, it looks with comparative indiffer- 
ence upon the duties which surround it at home, 
and is ever seeking greater opportunities some- 
where else. It has not time nor inclination nor 
faith to study the workings of Providence in its 
relations with the human race, in order that it 
may learn how to be perfect after the manner 
in which the heavenly Father is perfect ; but 
must work out every thing in a way of its own. 
Self-assertion is written upon all its movements ; 
an egotism that will not be silenced nor con- 
cealed. 

Worship is so innate a tendency of every human 
being, that we can never escape from it ; and, so 
fast as we turn from one object, we always turn 



REGENERATE LIFE. 119 

towards another. No sooner do we cease to wor- 
ship a personal, divine Being, than we set up an 
idol. Some human favorite, perhaps, usurps the 
throned place in the heart, where only Divinity 
should sit; or, it may be, our own intelligence 
becomes our god. If unintellectual in our tastes, 
w^e sink into some form of sensuous idolatry ; 
making money, position, fashion, dress, luxury, 
or any other dominant desire we may have, an 
idol, before which we bow perpetually, conse- 
crating to its service the first-fruits of all our 
thoughts and affections. 

This is no exceptional picture. Every human 
being has a temple within his heart, in which an 
object of worship sits enthroned, before whom he 
offers perpetual gifts of all that he is and all that 
he has. If the living God be not there, then 
Mammon, in some one of his Protean forms, has 
usurped the place. The man of pure intellectu- 
ality is apt to imagine himself morally superior to 
those who labor only for material gain ; but, if his 
aim be only to obtain the honors and emoluments 
of this world, he is but a slave of Mammon, after 
all. Or if he study simply for the gratification of 
his own taste, living apart from the world, he 
leads a life of pure selfishness. 



120 THE BUILDING-UP OF 



All worship is divided between three objects, — 
God, individual man, and the world. The wor- 
ship of the world, of one's self, or of some other 
human being, develops only the lower and more 
external part of our nature. The most internal 
and highest part of the soul can only be brought 
to conscious life through communion with the 
Holy Spirit. It lies closed, inert, and," as it were, 
dead, until the outer soul, through humble obe- 
dience to the divine law, becomes capable of receiv- 
ing the divine doctrines. Then the Holy Spirit is 
breathed into it ; and, if it resist not the incoming 
light, it comes forth like one risen from the dead ; 
weak, uncertain, trembling with a new joy which 
it fears may be but a passing emotion or a tran- 
sient dream. Trammelled with the old grave- 
clothes of habit, blinded by the napkin of doubt, it 
still hesitates and fears, till re-assured by the voice 
of the Lord, saying, "Loose him, and let him go." 
Then the world becomes a new creation, and the 
Divine Presence is everywhere felt. Not one's self 
only, but the world, has come from death into life ; 
and the things of the world are transfigured and 
made holy by the perception that they are the 
rounds of the ladder by which we are to mount 
into a higher existence. The more fully the spirit- 



. 



REGENERATE LIFE. 121 

nal life is awakened within us, the more highly 
we value material life ; because we see that it is 
the basis of the spiritual, the means by which we 
are to become disciplined and cultivated in the 
regenerating life : and, every step that we advance, 
we shall learn to value more and more this mate- 
rial apparatus with which the Creator has sur- 
rounded us ; for through it, if rightly used, we 
shall reach to a higher and higher comprehension 
and appreciation of spiritual things. As this pro- 
cess goes on, the faith becomes more and more 
perceptive ; gradually losing the traditional charac- 
ter that belonged to early life, and becoming 
assured with a conviction too soul-felt to admit of 
doubt. 

There are, however, those who resist the in- 
coming of the Spirit ; who look upon faith in the 
supernatural experiences of the soul as supersti- 
tion, regarding them as insane vagaries of the 
imagination ; and who cling to the material with 
a merely sensuous love, that shuts out the spirit- 
ual. 

When the Lord performed miracles upon earth, 
there were those who looked on, and affirmed that 
the power was from Beelzebub. They were told, 
in reply to their blasphemy, that there was one 

6 



122 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit, which could 
not be forgiven in this world or in the next. 

The same lips that uttered this fearful annuncia- 
tion commanded us to forgive our brother, though 
he sin against us seventy times seven, if he turn 
and repent. We must feel certain that any for- 
giveness of which we are capable is but the 
shadow of the infinite mercy of God, which is ever 
ready to bless the repentant sinner. A sin, then, 
which shuts us out from the divine forgiveness, 
must be one that so befools the understanding, 
and stupefies the affections, that it destroys the 
recuperative power of the soul, so that it can no 
longer repent. 

The Lord promised that he would be with his 
disciples always, — even to the end of the world ; 
and, if we are his disciples, it would seem that we 
should be able to recognize him, and should love 
to perceive him, not only in his word and works, 
but in our own hearts, where he reveals himself to 
the consciousness with an express adaptation to the 
individual wants of every human being, that makes 
the inflowing of his truth and love the most pre- 
cious gift he can bestow. If we refuse to believe 
that he is present with us now, and shut our hearts 
against his coming ; if we attribute the emotions 



REGENERATE LIFE. 123 

he may sometimes excite in us, when we are off 
our guard in our opposition to him, to disorder of 
the body or the mind, — we must be in much the 
same state as those who said, " He hath a devil, 
and is mad : " and it would seem to be wise in us 
to rouse ourselves before it is too late ; before we 
have so pledged our being to the powers of disbe- 
lief, that we have for ever closed our spiritual 
perceptions. 

The world of material things must vanish from 
our ken when the material organs of sense are 
closed in death ; and can we rationally hope that 
the spiritual senses will be found healthy and per- 
ceptive, if we have ignored spiritual things so 
long as we remained in the material body ? If we 
have measured heavenly things only by earthly 
standards while in the body, we have inverted the 
order of all things ; and our life has spread its roots 
deeper and deeper downward into the earth, with- 
out a corresponding growth upward towards heaven. 
Miserable, then, is our preparation for that eternal 
world towards which we are hastening, but from 
which we must shrink in doubt and fear, so long 
as our spiritual perceptions remain undeveloped. 

It is a fatal delusion of the human mind, that we 
can love the neighbor rightly, and fulfil our social 



124 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

duties as we ought, without loving the Lord, and 
without being taught of the Holy Scriptures. No 
human love stands more in need of regeneration 
- than the love we bear to ourselves ; and therefore 
our love to the neighbor must equally need en- 
lightenment and purification, since we are com- 
manded to love our neighbor as ourselves. We 
may love the neighbor, only to pamper his vices, 
just as we are prone to love ourselves. Many 
love their children in this way ; many believe that 
friendship requires that we love not only the vir- 
tues, but the vices, of our friend ; many, that 
patriotism requires us to defend the doings of our 
country, whether right or wrong. 

Love to the neighbor includes every variety of 
aifection we may bear towards our fellow-beings, 
whether individually or collectively ; and, in order 
that we may love the neighbor rightly, we must 
have wise views of human nature in all its various 
domestic, social, and civil relations. We may do 
as much mischief by indiscriminate indulgence 
towards those with whom we are brought into 
contact as by indiscriminate hatred. 

The dealings of the Divine Providence with 
humanity must be a perfect exemplification of love 
to the neighbor. The heavenly Father is the only 



REGENERATE LIFE. 125 

being capable of perfect love, — of love that ever 
seeks to bless, and that looks to the eternal good 
of humanity in all its benefactions. It gives and 
it takes away, it indulges and it denies, governed 
always by infinite mercy and infinite wisdom ; and 
those who truly love the Lord find always a 
blessing hidden within his dispensations, whether 
they come with smiles or tears, with gifts or with 
bereavements. 

If we would love our neighbor and ourselves 
aright, we must seek for wisdom to do so in the 
Divine Providence. Love of approbation may lead 
us to do much for our neighbor that can do him 
nothing but harm. Indolence may make us indis- 
criminately liberal and indiscriminately mischievous 
by our liberality. The dread of tears or of sad 
faces may make us indulgent to the caprices and 
whims, and even vices, of children and of friends. 
The east is not farther from the west than all 
this from any resemblance to the love the heavenly 
Father shows towards his children. All this is but 
the fruit of a hidden love of self, and contains 
nothing of the wisdom and mercy of that Being 
who seeks always the best good of his children. 

The love of self, of one's own qualities and 
opinions ; the desire to gratify one's own tastes or 



126 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

passions merely because they are one's own, with- 
out regard to right or wrong, — is the natural 
tendency of humanity. While we are in a merely 
natural state, the love we bear to other persons 
will be of the same quality as that which we feel 
for ourselves. We shall be capricious, partial, 
prejudiced, and unjust. We may love some per- 
sons, and indeed whole classes of persons, with 
the most zealous ardor ; but our affections will be 
confined within narrow limits, and we shall be 
liable to hate those who are without our limits as 
ardently as we love those who are within them. 
In opposition to St. Paul's noble exposition of 
charity, we shall not suffer long, and be kind ; we 
shall vaunt ourselves, and be puffed up ; we shall 
behave ourselves unseemly, seek our own, shall be 
easily provoked, and shall think much evil. 

When the love of self becomes regenerated, we 
shall seek to subdue our passions and opinions to 
the law of right, — to the absolute truth as it is in 
Jesus ; and then our hearts will warm towards 
our fellow-beings with a love that hopeth all 
things. Humbled by a sense of our own imper- 
fections, we shall not be in haste to condemn 
others, but shall forgive as we hope to be for- 
given. Not that we shall be lenient towards vice, 



REGENERATE LIFE. 127 

either in ourselves or others ; but that, feeling how 
much we stand in need of the divine mercy, we 
shall, in turn, be compassionate towards our fellow- 
sinners. Because we do not happen to sin in just 
the same way that they do, we shall not forget 
that we may be sinning in some way that is quite 
as offensive to our heavenly Father. The pride 
that exults in supposed sinlessness may sink us 
below the wretch, who, in presenting himself before 
the Lord, can only say in true humiliation of 
heart, w Be merciful to me, a sinner ! " 

The young man who had kept all the command- 
ments from his youth, who was pre-eminently rich 
in good works, drew from the Lord the exclama- 
tion, " How hardly shall they that have riches 
enter into the kingdom of God ! " It is evident 
that the riches of good works were here intended ; 
because, if the Lord had spoken merely of material 
wealth, the disciples would hardly have been as- 
tonished, and have asked, " Who, then, can be 
saved ? " Wandering in poverty with their divine 
Master, it would have pleased rather than have 
surprised them to be told that it was so hard for 
the rich to enter the heavenly kingdom. They 
would have exulted in the idea that the few rich 
were to be abased, and the many poor exalted. 



128 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

When they say, " Lo, we have left all, and have 
followed thee ! " the Lord answers again in purely 
figurative words, when he tells them that those 
who have forsaken property and friends for his 
sake and the gospel's, shall receive now, in this 
time, a hundred-fold, with persecutions ; and in 
the world to come, eternal life. It is evident that 
persecutions could not accompany the enjoyment 
of so much worldly wealth : but if we put for the 
houses they had left the natural man which they 
were striving to cast from them ; and for the 
parents, the seeming goods and truths from which 
their natural characters sprang ; and for children, 
the seemingly good and true ideas and thoughts 
and aspirations which were the offspring of their 
minds while in a natural state, — we can then see, 
that if the disciples really cast off and left all these, 
and were sincerely converted from them, they 
would receive in their place all manner of corre- 
sponding spiritual blessings. The possession of 
these must bring persecution, because it would 
separate them from the Jewish world around them ; 
but, in the world to come, it would insure them 
eternal life. 

Spiritual pride, the pride that trusts in its own 
wealth of good works, is a sin, we are thus 



REGENERATE LIFE. 129 

taught, which makes salvation almost impossible ; 
and this is because it renders us incapable of keep- 
ing the second commandment. 

As sinning against the Holy Spirit poisons the 
fountains of our faith, making it impossible for 
us to be pious towards God ; so sinning against 
our fellow-beings in the pride that loves to say in 
heart, if not in word, " I am holier than thou," 
makes it impossible for us to be charitable towards 
the neighbor. The one sin is born of the pride of 
intellect ; the other, of the pride of life. They 
naturally belong together, and mutually strengthen 
each other. We may live bond-slaves to their 
power, and yet lead lives of the most perfect 
respectability, and die lamented and eulogized by 
society. These two sins which the Lord de- 
nounced so fearfully, declaring that the one made 
salvation impossible, and the other almost so, are 
perfectly compatible with a life that shall make us 
loved and admired in our relations with the world. 
This makes them doubly dangerous ; for it is very 
hard to believe that God condemns us, when the 
tongue of man gives us so much praise. The 
world loves its own ; and, if the world loves us 
very much, it should put us on our guard, lest 
peradventure it so love us because we so love it. 

6* 



130 THE BUILDING-UP OF 

The viper is not more insidious in its movements, 
or more deadly in its poison, than the love of the 
world within the heart, when we fail to recognize 
it, and to put ourselves on our guard against its 
devices. 

A truly religious faith and life can be founded 
only upon the two great commandments ; the first 
being the essence, the second the form, of all 
that we believe and love and do. Only so far as 
we comprehend and appreciate and love the Lord 
our God can we love the neighbor without self- 
ishness, and understand our duty towards him. 
Only so far as we look to the Lord for light, and 
lean upon him for strength, can we embody our 
love to the neighbor into our lives, without danger 
of harming rather than helping him. 

It is in seeking our own life, striving to live out 
our own wilfulness, that we are bewildered, if not 
lost, in spiritual death : but in giving up our own 
will, laying down our own life that we may re- 
ceive the life of the Lord and do his will, we find 
that eternal life which we all hope for ; that heaven- 
ly peace which is in the heart of every true disci- 
ple ; that perfect freedom which is embodied in the 
harmonious life of heaven, which ever becomes 
more perfect as it becomes more full, because each 



REGENERATE LIFE. 131 

individual loves and seeks the happiness of the 
whole- 
While listening to the voices of many indi- 
viduals talking at the same time in a social party, 
every one has been struck by the discordance of the 
sound. This discord represents the want of har- 
mony in the hearts of those thus met together ; 
for the tone of the voice corresponds to the affec- 
tions of the soul. This sound is the result of that 
freedom which man loves in his unregenerate 
state, — the freedom to do as he pleases, without 
regard to God or the neighbor. 

Every one has listened with delight to the ex- 
quisite cadences of sound produced by the wind in 
a wood, especially among pine-trees, or by the 
waves rolling in upon a beach. Myriads of 
leaves or of drops of water combine to produce 
these two great choirs of the material world ; and 
yet the result is the most delicious harmony. The 
reason of this is, that each leaf and each wave 
moves in exact obedience to the laws of gravita- 
tion, which, in the material world, hold all tilings 
in their true places, just as the laws of divine 
goodness hold all things in their true places in the 
spiritual world. As, in the material world around 
us, all discordant sounds are the result of the tern- 



132 THE REGENERATE LIFE. 

porary interruption of the laws of gravitation ; so, 
in the spiritual world within us, all discordance is 
caused by our disobedience to the laws of the Di- 
vine Goodness. The discordant sounds of nature 
typify the selfish liberty which we enjoy when 
regardless of the laws of love to God and the 
neighbor : the harmonious sounds typify the heav- 
enly freedom which we love when we seek to do 
what is right because it is God's law. We are 
slow to perceive the beauty of this freedom, and, 
at first, it looks to us like bondage ; but, so soon 
as we begin to come into it, we feel that not to 
love it would be like loving to sing and play out 
of time and tune. No one, who has any ear for 
music, would feel it a desirable state of freedom 
to be a discordant unit in an orchestra or choir : 
on the contrary, it would be a bondage that could 
give only pain and annoyance. So the discord 
which comes of the want of piety and morality 
affects the spiritual sense of the regenerate soul 
with the keenest anguish : while the concord which 
results from obedience to the laws of the divine 
harmony affords a delight as far beyond that which 
results from any earthly music, as the spiritual 
transcends the material ; the infinite, the finite ; 
the eternal, that which endures but for a day. 



THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 



S£&£ 3^8/22 



The past and the future exist as one in the present; for the 
present is at once the fruit of the past, and the seed of the future. 




THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 




EW minds are entirely absorbed in the 
present hour. The past, with its store 
of memories, pleasant or painful, still 
clings to us ; and the future, with its multifarious 
hopes and fears, occupies a large proportion of 
our thoughts. 

We are apt to think too little of our thoughts, 
and to let them take their own course too freely, 
without considering that they are capable of every 
degree of good or evil, no less than our words or 
our actions. "Vain regrets, and hopes as vain," 
too often enervate our powers, and unfit us for the 
proper performance of the duties of life that be- 
long to the present day ; making life a sorrow and 
a care, instead of a daily offering of submission 
and trust. 

[135] 



136 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

Rightly to acquiesce in the past, and rightly to 
anticipate the future, are Christian duties too much 
neglected ; by many scarcely placed among duties, 
or perhaps even quite forgotten. 

We are prone, in our sorrowful and our anxious 
moods of mind, to magnify our own powers and 
our own accountabilities, and not to think enough 
of the Omnipotence that w shapes our ends, rough- 
hew them how we will." We surround the past 
with a cloud of K ifs " wherewith to imbitter mem- 
ory. If we had done this, or if we had not done 
that, something we can never cease to regret 
might never have happened : and yet, perhaps, the 
act done or omitted was one whose bearings we 
did not at all comprehend at the time ; and it 
could not, therefore, have been one over which we 
ought to grieve with any feeling of remorse. So, 
too, in regard to events over which we ourselves 
had no control, we often feel, that if others had 
done their duty, or if some event had only fallen 
out a little differently from what it did, all might 
have been as we could wish. Our fortune might 
not have been lost, our friend might not have 
died, our hopes might not have been disappointed ; 
in short, we might have had our own way, and 
not have been obliged to bear the cross allotted to 



THE PAST AND THE FUTURE, 137 

us. TTe forget that our heavenly Father was 
there, and could easily have overruled all these 
mistakes, or permitted all these "its," had it 
seemed best to his wisdom : and therefore the 
event demands our humble acquiescence : and it 
is resisting the will of the heavenly Father if we 
refuse to be comforted, or if we fail to acknow- 
ledge his presence and his power in what has come 
to pass. w If thou hadst been here, our brother 
had not died ! " was the exclamation of the unbe- 
lieving sisters as they met the Lord, who had 
waited for the death of Lazarus that he might 
the more wonderfully show forth his power ; and 
this is the exclamation of every heart that gives 
way to unavailing regret for the past. It does not 
believe that the Lord was near when the sorrowful 
event took place. It exalts the human above the 
divine in the affairs of life, and cannot believe that 
there is a special Providence caring for its welfare, 
more constantly, more wisely, and more merci- 
fully, than it can care for itself. 

So in regard to the future : while we should take 
every wise precaution in order to insure success to 
our plans and anticipations, we should be careful 
to remember that the Lord is always supreme, 
and that in his hands are the issues of our lives. 



138 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

Circumstances are never entirely in our power ; 
but it is in our power to make a good use even of 
the worst in the training of our own minds and 
hearts. We should watch the workings of our 
thoughts and affections, and see whether good or 
evil is developed in them by the daily events of 
our lives ; whether we are patient and long-suf- 
fering and kind, when our plans are frustrated 
and our hopes are disappointed; or whether we 
are offended and inconsolable, discontented with 
ourselves and with Providence. 

Most persons live more in the future than the 
present. Our now is seldom so satisfactory that 
we are not hoping for something better to come. 
But whether the future will be any better or hap- 
pier than the past or the present, depends much 
more upon the culture we bestow upon ourselves 
than on the care we take for the circumstances 
that surround us. When the disciples were look- 
ing forward for a future, external kingdom of 
heaven, the Lord told them that it was within 
themselves ; and, in the same way, each of us 
carries about a kingdom of happiness or of misery 
within his own heart, created by his own affec- 
tions, and only in some measure modified by sur- 
rounding circumstances. Therefore the more we 



THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 139 

regard the future of our mental and moral devel- 
opment, and the less we think about the future of 
external life, the better and happier we shall 
become. 

The future that we hope for is the index of our 
mental state ; and, if we desire to know ourselves, 
we can probably do so in no more ready way than 
by observing our hopes and wishes as they rise 
spontaneously in our minds. 

We wish lazily for many things without ever 
going in pursuit of them. We fancy that we 
really wish to possess them ; but still we never set 
ourselves diligently to obtain them. An examina- 
tion of these wishes would show us the negative 
side of our characters. There are other things that 
we wish for eagerly, that we pursue with ardor, 
that we strive for with all our might ; and these 
wishes reveal the positive side of the character. 

These words negative and positive are not used 
in an exact and philosophic sense in this connec- 
tion : but they may serve to designate, on the one 
hand, those desires or impulses of the mind which 
have an actual existence, but are controlled and 
neutralized by others ; and, on the other hand, 
those which are powerful and victorious, and come 
forth into the life. 



140 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

In society 9 we often hear persons exclaiming, 
w How I wish I could do this or that ! " n How 
I wish I possessed this or that accomplishment ! " 
K How I wish I were good-tempered, hke this one ! 
or industrious and persevering, like that one ! " 
The larger number of these wishes are uttered in 
a tone which plainly indicates that there is no 
vitality in the wish ; that the speaker has no in- 
tention of trying to obtain the thing wished for ; 
that the words in which it was uttered came from 
the tongue only, and not from the heart. These 
are all negative wishes. The wisher did not de- 
sire the accomplishments or virtues he talked of, 
so much because he loved them, as because he 
saw that they made their possessor admired in 
society ; or perhaps he thought that those to whom 
he spoke would feel some degree of admiration for 
him, merely because he expressed a desire for that 
which was esteemed admirable in others ; or per- 
haps it soothed his own vanity, to believe, for the 
moment, that he really desired to become better or 
wiser than he felt himself to be. Other wishes we 
hear spoken in an earnest tone, as if they came 
out from the abundance of the heart ; and we feel 
assured that the speaker will at once set about 
attaining the object wished for. These are posi- 



THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 141 

tive wishes, and will result in effort; and in pro- 
portion as they are vital, and truly belong to the 
character, they will be obtained. 

If we look within our own hearts, we shall find 
a little world there, going on in a mode similar to 
that of the larger world of society in which we 
live. Each one of us has his negative and his 
positive wishes ; is pleasing himself with believing 
that he is the better for forming wishes that he 
never ultimates in action, because they are negative 
wishes ; or wishing from his heart for things that 
he will obtain, because he wishes for them posi- 
tively. 

The mind tends naturally to estimate itself by 
its negative rather than by its positive traits ; by 
the tilings which it desires passively, rather than 
by the tilings which it desires actively. The 
things which we desire passively, we .desire with 
the thoughts of the understanding ; while the things 
which we desire actively, we desire with the 
affections of the heart. We incline to estimate 
ourselves by our thoughts, rather than by our af- 
fections ; because the understanding can measure 
the thoughts with ease, while the affections are too 
secret and too interior to be sounded by any line 
that the understanding can cast. 



142 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

The impulses of active life come from the hid- 
den sources of the affections, while the thoughts 
serve only as guides and helps to ultimate the 
affections in the outward life. The understanding 
is thus the servant of the will or heart, and is 
neither so good nor so evil as its master. The 
thoughts desire what the understanding tells them 
is wise, while the affections desire what the heart 
tells them is good. The understanding gives its 
reasons for the faith that is in it, in clear and 
precise words, making every thing palpable and 
distinct in the thoughts ; and, as we reason within 
ourselves, we believe that these wise thoughts are 
our very selves. The reasonings of the heart or 
will are intuitive, and far quicker than those of 
the understanding : so quick, that the understand- 
ing cannot take cognizance of them as they are 
formed ; a*nd so interior, that it never entirely 
comprehends them. The understanding gives life 
to the perceptions and thoughts : the will gives 
life to the affections, emotions, and passions. 

Much of what passes in the world for hypocrisy 
is the result of a want of harmony between the 
understanding and the will. Men talk morally 
and wisely about ethics and religion, because they 
are sensible ; and then go away and act foolishly 



TILE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 143 

and wickedly, because they have selfish and evil 
hearts. 

Peter was perfectly sincere when he told the 
Lord he would die rather than deny him ; but the 
selfishness of his will overcame him at the first 
temptation. What is sinful is always foolish; 
and, as we think about sin in the abstract, its folly 
compels our understanding to condemn it : but 
presently the choice is brought directly home to 
us, whether to commit this sin, or to deny our- 
selves, and perhaps to take up a heavy cross ; and 
our hearts, as it w^ere, die within us, and we sin, 
perhaps impulsively, like Peter ; perhaps delibe- 
ately, like Iscariot. 

It is a common mistake in education to sup- 
pose, that, if the intellectual faculties are thorough- 
ly trained, evil will be crowded out of the mind 
by the force of rationality. Unfortunately, al- 
though rationality teaches us the folly of all evil 
tilings in the abstract, and makes us see how foolish 
they are in other people, it does very little, if any 
thing, towards opening our eyes to our own follies ; 
or, if it compel us to acknowledge them to be fol- 
lies, it by no means follows that it prevents us from 
committing them, because our dominant wishes are 
very sure to be stronger than our rationality. 



144 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

It has been well remarked by a writer on edu- 
cation, that " it is the wish of the young mind 
which first trains the faculties." What the child 
wishes for, generally decides what the man will 
wish for. The chief end of education should be 
to lead the child to desire what is truly good from 
good motives ; and the chief end of self-training 
should be to learn what is intrinsically good, and 
then to seek after it, with singleness of heart, be- 
cause it is good. 

Whatever we love seems good to us, so long as 
we are in a natural or unregenerate state. The 
first movement we make towards a spiritual or 
regenerate state, we discover that there is an ab- 
solute good ; a something that is good, though we 
may not love it. We can have an intellectual 
perception of this absolute good, long before we 
learn to love it, and possibly without ever learning 
to love it at all. We acknowledge in our own 
minds that we are possessed by evil habits and 
passions, and we determine to break away from 
them, and rise above them ; but, when the hour 
of temptation comes, we fall again and again, even 
when we finally escape from the bondage of sin. 
Too often, however, we go on to the end of our 
temporal lives, slaves to sins, the evil of which we 



THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 145 

recognize intellectually, with perfect distinctness, 
but which we never abandon, because our affec- 
tions have never come into agreement with our 
intelligence. 

One of the great dangers of life is the decep- 
tion we are liable to fall into, of believing that 
we truly wish to be possessed of some particular 
virtue, while we are continually falling into the 
opposite vice. No one can do this, unless he 
really loves the vice, and wishes for its enjoyment. 
When not assailed by temptation, our intelligence 
shows us the evil consequences of our vices ; and 
then the dread of those consequences causes us to 
determine that we will avoid them in future by 
ceasing to sin : but, the moment temptation comes, 
the wish for indulgence is aroused, and we fall. 
This is because our wish for the vice is positive, 
while the wish for the opposite virtue is negative. 
The positive can be expelled from the soul, only 
by the positive. We may think that we have cast 
a sin out of doors for ever, and complacently 
sweep and garnish the vacant house : but, while 
it is vacant, there is nothing to hinder the return 
of the old tenant, or to prevent his bringing 
seven other sins with him, whenever the hour of 
temptation opens the door ; and, each time that 

7 



146 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

this happens, the soul falls into a lower state than 
before. Here was no conversion. The wish of 
the heart remained, all the time, the same. It was 
stunned, for a while, by the blow the understand- 
ing gave it, when it east it out of doors ; but by 
the time the understanding, supposing its work 
finished, began to think about something else, the 
old wish was all alive again, and ready to return 
to its former abode. The difficulty of driving vice 
out of the heart, in this way, is not great; but 
there is nothing harder than to keep it out ever 
afterwards. To do this, a positive virtue must 
take the place where the old vice dwelt. Then 
there is a true conversion, a genuine regeneration 
of the heart. The wish is " born again," and, 
from positive evil, is become positive good. 

We are told by the Lord, " No man can come 
to me, except the Father draw him." That is, no 
man can come to the truth, unless he is drawn to 
it by goodness. No man can love the truth as it 
is in God the Son, unless he loves goodness as 
it is in God the Father. 

No one who is not fatuous with vice can read 
the moral code revealed by the Lord, and hesitate 
to acknowledge that obedience to it would make 
earth heaven. But, alas ! no one can read it, and 



THE PAST AND THE FUTUKE. 147 

not feel that his heart rebels against it somewhere. 
There is no one who does not wish for something 
that the Lord tells him he must not have, and 
must not desire ; no one who in all things loves 
his neighbor as himself, and the Lord above all. 
The despairing soul inquires with trembling, " Who, 
then, can be saved?" and the answer comes, 
" The things which are impossible with men are 
possible with God." Our own unregenerate un- 
derstandings may cast vice out from the soul for 
a little while ; but God only can give us a virtue to 
fill the vacant place, and thereby make the return 
of vice impossible. If we have ever effectually 
cast out a vice without going to our heavenly 
Father for the power, and in all humility acknow- 
ledging that the power is his alone, we have filled 
the vacant room with some other vice stronger 
than the one we cast out, and our last state is worse 
than our first. Pride is a demon, mighty for this 
work. It tells us to avoid vice, that we may be 
respectable, that we may be rich, that we may rise 
to high places, that we may look down upon our 
neighbors ; and it can swell itself so largely as to 
fill every one of the vacant rooms our other vices 
have occupied. It is the father of a legion of 
other vices, and, like Saturn, devours its children, 



148 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

that they may not dethrone him. If any doubt 
that this is so, let him ask himself, "When I am 
under the dominion of pride, to whom do my 
wishes tend ? " and the only answer he can make 
is, " To mine own self." There is no worship of 
God in pride, and there is no love for the neigh- 
bor. To the proud man, self is the only God ; 
and the neighbor is valued, only as he helps to 
glorify self. 

We are told by the Lord, " No man cometh 
unto the Father but by me ; " and again, c? I am 
the way." There is no contradiction between 
these assertions and that previously quoted, ?c No 
man can come unto me, except the Father draw 
him." These truths sustain and are essential to 
each other. We cannot love the truth, unless we 
love goodness ; but, again, we can only learn to 
love goodness by doing the truth. We cannot 
come unto the Son, unless the Father draw us ; 
that is, we cannot arrive at the truth, unless we 
are drawn to it by the love of goodness : and 
we cannot come unto the Father but through the 
Son; that is, we can arrive at goodness, only 
by walking in the way of truth, by obeying the 
words of the Son, who was himself the Word of 
God. 



THE TAST AND THE FUTURE. 149 

There are three degrees of life in the will, — 
affection, emotion, and passion; and these three 
severally express themselves in wishes, aspirations, 
and prayers. We first wish for a thing, then 
aspire after it, then pray for it. If the will tend 
only towards self and the world, our wishes, aspi- 
rations, and prayers will be directed in a way that 
will drag us continually downward in the scale of 
being. This is sometimes the case with persons 
who take an intellectual pleasure in contemplat- 
ing the law of the Lord, and who therefore fancy 
themselves religious, but who love religion only 
as a speculation of the understanding, and never 
apply it to their lives. Let such persons watch 
the movements of their own minds, and they will 
find that their wishes are limited by self and 
the world ; that their aspirations tend only to the 
things of the world ; that their prayers even do not 
take hold upon the things of heaven, and, if ver- 
bally proffered in the name of the Lord, are really 
uttered only in the name of self. 

If the will be filled with love to God and the 
neighbor, its affections, emotions, and passions are 
all instinct with heavenly fire ; and as they warm 
into wishes, glow in aspirations, or burn in prayer, 
all things are desired, sought after, and prayed 



150 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

for, with a view to heavenly use. Then we seek 
the Father through obedience to the Son ; and the 
Father draws us, so that obedience to the Son 
becomes possible. 

The aspirations and prayers of the human beings 
who surround us are known with certainty only 
to the Omniscient Mind. We can judge of them, 
only as they ultimate themselves through wishes 
in the material world ; for we fashion the world 
around us in accordance with our wishes. Every 
human dwelling-place is compacted of the wishes 
of its inmates. Every human character is the 
embodiment of the wishes of the individual mind. 
The wishes of the mind train the faculties, both of 
head and heart, all through life. Save in those 
few exceptional cases where bodily infirmity or 
the pressure of outward circumstances prohibits 
freedom of action, it is the wish of the mind that 
determines whether the body shall dwell amid 
squalid poverty or thrifty comfort. It is the wish 
of the mind that decides whether the intellect 
shall abide in ignorance and weakness, or be 
nourished and made strong by education. It is 
the wish of the mind that makes the heart harder 
and more callous every day, or grow in grace 
continually; and, when the gates of death are 



THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 151 

passed, it is still the wish of the mind that gives 
the final answer, whether the immortal spirit shall 
sink into hell, or rise to heaven. 

Wishes may ultimate themselves in wealth, in 
education, in high position, whether the aspira- 
tions and prayers of the mind tend earthward or 
heavenward ; for the possessions of this life are 
in themselves neither good nor evil, but derive 
their quality from the motives for which they are 
sought, and the purposes to which they are ap- 
plied. During the early periods of life, the two 
classes, of those who look up and those who look 
down, are often difficult to distinguish. As life 
advances, the growth of character begins to show 
the more secret tendencies of the soul ; and old 
age, at last, rarely fails to exhibit the full devel- 
opment of the principles, whether good or evil, 
that were adopted in youth. 

It is not uncommon to hear avarice, selfishness, 
ill-temper, and other vices, excused on the plea 
that the perpetrator is old ; as if it were to be 
expected that we should shed our virtues as wo 
do our hair and our teeth. If the soul died with 
the body, such an excuse might be rational, be- 
cause then it would naturally become weak and 
decrepit as the strength of the body failed; but, 



152 TILE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

since the soul casts off the body in order that it 
may rise into a higher life, if its wishes and hopes 
tend toward that life, the soul would become more 
full of heavenly traits with every added year. 

The good man and the bad man often wish for 
the same thing ; but one wishes from a bad mo- 
tive, and the other from a good one. If we would 
lead heavenly lives, we must not only wish for 
good things, but must wish for them from good 
motives. We must watch our wishes as they 
form themselves, and often stop in our course to 
ask ourselves why we are wishing for that which 
we pursue. They who wish for good things from 
good motives will never grow into an old age 
that shall be less lovely than their youth ; for 
each year must add new graces to their charac- 
ters, as it brings them nearer to their heavenly 
home. 

There is a fearful downward tendency in the 
human soul. The thrifty, active laborer too often 
becomes, in later life, the churlish miser; the 
frugal, industrious housewife sinks into the shrew- 
ish, hard old woman ; the careful, energetic mer- 
chant becomes narrow and avaricious ; the politi- 
cian, a mere man of expedients ; the fine woman 
of society, as the period of her sway passes by, 



THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 153 

grows discontented, overbearing, and fault-find- 
ing. Wherever Ave look, throughout society, sad 
examples abound, that if we look at them aright, 
in a spirit of humility, and not of pride, will teach 
us to avoid the dangers that have proved fatal to 
so many who have gone before us. 

There is no time when humility is more needful 
than when we are contemplating the vices of our 
fellow-beings ; for we are never so liable to sin 
ourselves as when we are looking, in a spirit of 
self-grat ulation, at the sins of others. Pride goes 
before a fall, because it puts us off our guard, and 
blinds us to the fact that we also are weak, and 
liable to sin, if not in the same way as those about 
us, in some other way just as bad. The sins of 
our neighbor should awaken our sympathy and 
compassion, and so make us willing and able to 
aid him in turning away from his sin ; which we 
can never do, if we meet him in a spirit of pride : 
and, at the same time, it should arouse our watch- 
fulness in regard to our own liability to wrong- 
doing, and make us pray more earnestly, w Lead 
us not into temptation." 

We are commanded to watch and to pray ; and 
the watching is quite as needful as the prayer. We 
pray to the Lord, and we watch ourselves ; and 

7* 



154 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE, 

the watching is the reciprocal action of the prayer. 
The moment watchfulness ceases, prayer becomes 
a negative action of the mind. It is to no pur- 
pose that the sentinel remains at his post, if his 
eyes are closed in sleep. While we are young in 
religious life, it is natural for us to be on our 
guard ; but, so soon as we begin to feel any thing 
like security in our position, we begin to diminish 
our watchfulness. Then our prayers lose their 
fervor, our aspirations their warmth, and our 
wishes become bounded by the love of self and of 
the world. The Christian life is a continual war- 
fare with self-love and worldliness ; and, whatever 
form these assume, we must challenge them, and 
compel them to confession. Our daily life is a 
perpetual succession of wishes. The pulsations 
of the heart send not the blood with a more 
steady flow through the arteries, than the affec- 
tions of the will send forth their wishes through 
the soul. As these are pure or impure, selfish or 
charitable, heavenly or earthly, the spiritual life 
becomes angelic or infernal. As we value our 
eternal lives, we must watch this long file of 
wishes as they rise, and question them whence 
they come, and whither they would go ; and we 
must be satisfied only with the plainest and fullest 



THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 155 

answers. It will not do to imagine that some are 
good, and some are bad ; and that, if the majority 
are good, we are safe. As the character becomes 
fixed, they gradually take their position all on one 
side or the other. It is only while the character is 
forming, that the good and the bad, as it were, 
balance each other. When it becomes formed, 
the wishes all tend one way. We may sometimes 
stumble, or even fall, in our course, from the 
weakness of the flesh or of the spirit; but our 
wishes all tend towards the heavenly city, if we 
watch and pray with faithful hearts. The soldier 
of Christ cannot serve two masters ; and if, in an 
unguarded moment, he becomes entangled with 
the soldiers of Mammon, he will soon find his 
mistake, and flee from the ways of temptation. 
He may, from weakness, sometimes be overcome ; 
but he is never found wilfully fighting on the 
wrong side. Humanity is imperfect, even in the 
best of Christians, and no one can cease entirely 
from sin ; but let us never forget, that, so long as 
we indulge ourselves wilfully and habitually in the 
practice of one sin, we are traitors to the cause we 
pretend to serve. 

An habitual watchfulness over our wishes as 
they rise, allowing none to go forth into act but 



156 THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

such as we can pray may be blessed of Heaven, 
and an habitual acknowledgment that it is only as 
we open our hearts to receive the heavenly bless- 
ing that we are capable of leading a heavenly life, 
must constitute our only safety. Watchfulness 
gives the shield of purity, and prayer gives the 
sword of strength ; and, thus armed and pro- 
tected, the battle is sure to be ours. 

The past gives us wisdom, if we remember it 
rightly ; the present gives us opportunity for 
bringing our wisdom forth into life ; and our whole 
future will be the result and embodiment of past 
and present. We must not look forward to the 
future as to something quite apart from the past 
and the present ; for to-morrow is now building 
up out of yesterday and to-day. Time is one long 
chain, however numerous its links ; and our life 
is all bound up in a unity that cannot be separat- 
ed. The present is a perpetual resurrection of 
the past ; and the future exists only in imagination, 
until it ceases to be future, and becomes present. 
To-day is all that we can, in any measure, control ; 
and, so far as we make each to-day faithful in 
duty, we shall look back upon the past without 
regret, and forward to the future without anxiety 
or fear. 



WAR AND PEACE. 




Truth is many-sided, and our limited vision can grasp it only in 
parts: thus we are often le^L to doubt its being truth, because the 
parts we are able to see at one time do not make a harmonious 
whole. 




WAR AND PEACE. 



JSIAR seems to many minds to be the na- 
1 tural state of the earth, and all that it 
contains. The elements are perpetually 
at strife. Winds and waves ; electricity and mag- 
netism ; earth shaken by internal convulsion, or 
disintegrated by the action of air and water; 
chemical and mechanical power acting upon both 
the mineral and vegetable world, — all are working 
to destroy present forms, as if creation were for 
no other end than destruction. 

The animal world offers a similar picture. 
From the minutest insect discovered by the micro- 
scope, to the hugest of beasts and fishes, all are 
at war, offensively or defensively ; all are either 
devouring or devoured. 

Man again repeats the same story. Whether 
savage or civilized, ever the strong is striving to 

[159] 



160 WAR AND PEACE. 

destroy the weak, ever the fierce is tyrannizing 
over the timid. 

Side by side with all this destruction, the peace- 
ful power of creation goes on as constantly, re- 
constructing, re-organizing, revivifying the world; 
silently but steadily working with a power strong 
enough to overrule destruction, and bring a new 
order, better than that which went before, out of 
what seemed the defeat of all system or plan. 

The changes of day and night and of the sea- 
sons of the year offer a very perfect type of the 
greater cycles of the world. To him who should 
first see the setting sun, knowing nothing of the 
certainty of its re-appearance, how fearful would 
be the coming-down of the evening darkness ! how 
terrible the weary hours of night ! And winter, 
coming like an overpowering army and conquer- 
ing the face of the earth, to one who had never 
seen its progress and its passing-away, would seem 
like the veritable death of the world. In due 
time, darkness yields to light ; and the cold of win- 
ter yields to the peaceful warmth of spring-time, 
and is more than conquered by the creative heat 
of summer. 

So order came out from chaos ; so creation ever 
follows destruction ; so life wakes up from death ; 



WAR AND PEACE. 1G1 

so beauty rises out from ashes, and mourning is 
exchanged for the oil of joy. 

The order of nature is found in all things to be 
progress through alternations of defeat and suc- 
cess. There is no such thing as steady, prosperous 
growth. All things have their intervals of pause, 
decline, or even retrograde movement, however 
successful they may be finally. Final success to 
all things that should prevail is certain as day is 
sure to follow night, or summer to take the place 
of winter. 

In our haste, we are often tempted to think 
that Providence is not on the side of right ; that 
injustice is more powerful than justice, vice than 
virtue ; and that the progress of the world is 
downward to final destruction. Yet an enlight- 
ened view of any prolonged, historic period shows 
us, that, as centuries have rolled by, mankind have 
made great advances in rightful development, 
though their feet have often staggered in carnage, 
and their eyes been blinded by what seemed black- 
est night of falsehood. 

The peace-giving, creative power is stronger 
than the contentious, destructive power. The 
love of God is omnipotent, and must finally pre- 
vail. Slowly but surely, order and harmony and 



162 WAR AND PEACE. 

peace march onward with silent tread, subduing 
all things to his gracious purposes. The doubter 
asks : Why this slowness, if the power of peace be 
omnipotent ? Because man is endowed with free 
will, and the Divine Wisdom seeks to draw him to 
goodness, without infringing upon his liberty. 
The Creator might have endowed man with all 
good attributes, so that he should be faithful to 
them as animals are to their instincts ; but then 
man would have been only a higher animal, 
whereas the Creator desired him to be a voluntary 
human being, free to choose between good and 
evil. 

The world in which he is placed, imperfect as 
himself, yet full of capacities whereby it may ap- 
proach perfection, is designed to instruct him by 
types and figures as to what he is, and to what he 
may attain. The Scriptures, in a more distinct 
and perfect, yet still typical language, give him 
the same instruction ; and to them he must look 
for his highest enlightenment. 

In the Scriptures, we find what at first seems 
contradiction, in the warlike threatenings and 
peaceful promises that alternate through its pages. 
Creation and destruction, in the works of God, 
are parallel with peace and war in his Word. 



WAR AND PEACE. 163 

The omnipotent Father permits destruction and 
war, that the evil may be subdued, and give place 
to the good. He is at once the God of battles 
and the Prince of peace. He makes bare his arm 
to smite the wicked, and keeps those in perfect 
peace who stay their souls on him. 

At the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, he was 
announced by angelic choirs as one who should 
bring w peace on earth, and good-will toward 
men." Before parting with his disciples, he said to 
them, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give 
unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto 
you." After performing his miracles of healing 
upon the suffering, his usual salutation was, "Go 
in peace." On the other hand, he says, "Think 
not that I am come to send peace on earth : I 
came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am 
come to set a man at variance against his father, 
and the daughter against her mother, and the 
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law ; and 
a man's foes shall be they of his own household." 

The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. 
Man attains to peace by and through war, whether 
we consider him individually or collectively. 
Each man and woman, who wins salvation, wins 
it through war, and so comes into that peace 



164 WAR AND PEACE. 

which passeth all understanding. In a similar 
way, nations, through war and all its tribulations, 
are brought, century by century, something nearer 
the kingdom of heaven. 

In the heart of each one of us, there- is a house- 
hold corresponding to that which is about us in 
the external world. The ruling intellectual prin- 
ciple within us corresponds to our father ; and the 
ruling affection, to our mother. Below these are 
subordinate principles and affections, which are as 
brothers and sisters to us ; and, again, there are 
other principles and affections developed in our 
minds, which are as sons and daughters. All 
these must be regenerated before we can come into 
a state of peace. The being born again is not a 
thing of generalities, but of particulars and of 
details. All the^principles and affections must be 
changed from natural to spiritual, from earthly to 
heavenly, before we can form a peaceful house- 
hold. 

It is no easy or peaceful task to bring all the 
members of this household into subjection to the 
laws of truth and goodness. There will be wars, 
and rumors of war, so long as pride, ambition, 
worldliness, vanity, envy, discontent, anger, censo- 
riousness, and all the other hydra-like heads of our 



WAR AND PEACE. 1G5 

unregencrate nature, with more or less strength 
and endurance, assert then* claims for indulgence. 
The catalogue of vices looks very ugly, and we 
are fain to believe that it does not belong to us ; 
but who among us is without sin ? Whose heart 
has no secret evils, hidden though they may be 
from others by prudence, good breeding, or other 
masks, that our desire for the good opinion of our 
neighbors helps us to put on ? Not until we can 
abstain from all wrong, whether of deed or word 
or thought, because we love the Lord and our 
neighbor, is our warfare over, and our peace 
attained. 

Still, there are persons who seem to others to be 
at peace, and who believe themselves in peace ; 
and yet they have not gone through the warfare 
needful to this change. They are happy as they 
are, and do not see the necessity of all this effort 
and contention. 

There are two kinds of peace, — the peace 
which belongs to this world, and the peace which 
belongs to heaven. The Lord says, " Peace I 
•leave with you, my peace I give unto you ; not as 
the world giveth give I unto you." Again he 
says, "If ye were of the world, the world would 
love his own ; but because ye are not of the 



166 WAR AND PEACE. 

world, but I have chosen you out of the world, 
therefore the world hateth you." 

There is a peace felt by those who love the world, 
and whom the world loves in return, that is very 
agreeable to the natural mind, and which often 
seems like genuine, heavenly peace. It is full of 
self-complacency and satisfaction. With some, it 
is condescending and ben'evolent ; with others, it is 
ostentatious and patronizing. This is the peace 
which incites the prayer, " I thank thee that I am 
not as other men." In this peace, there is no- 
thing that tends in any way towards spiritual 
growth or life ; but, on the contrary, it belongs 
entirely to this world, and seeks only what this 
world can give. It glories only in its own pos- 
sessions and attainments, its own kingdom and 
power, without giving any glory to Him from 
whom cometh every good and perfect gift. It 
values others in proportion as they minister in 
some way to its own dignity or pleasure ; and, if 
it ministers to others, it is always with a desire, 
more or less hidden, that they, in turn, may minis- 
ter to it. 

Such peace makes the possessor dearly love life 
in this world ; and many of this class would be 
willing to live here indefinitely, or to repeat life 



WAR AND PEACE. 167 

over again just as it has been already lived by 
them. There is in this peace nothing that looks 
toward a future life. It is all centred in the en- 
joyment of that which now is. 

The world admires, and sometimes dearly loves, 
these peaceful persons ; for they spend their lives 
in seeking the admiration and the love of the 
world. Verily, they receive then reward. 

The peace given by the Lord to his disciples 
is something entirely apart from all this. His 
kingdom is not of this world, and his followers 
look constantly through this world to that which 
lies beyond. They seek a heavenly country while 
living, and through living in this. The admiration 
of the world gives them no satisfaction, unless 
their own hearts tell them that their Master says, 
K Well done, good and faithful servants ! " Then 
they feel that they can enter into the joy of their 
Lord. Their peace is the only true liberty ; for, 
through it, they are made independent of the world 
and of their own passions. 

Such peace is not easily attained. It is reached 
through steadfast combat with the legion of wronsj 
thoughts, affections, and propensities, that infest 
the human heart. It can be found only through 
self-denial, tribulation, and warfare : but, for this 



168 WAR AND PEACE. 

treasure, we may rejoice to sell all that we have 
beside ; no matter how much the world may- 
admire it, or admire us for holding it in posses- 
sion. 

Nations, like individuals, go through all these 
states of contention and warfare in the progressive 
growth of the ages ; and they have their states of 
worldly peace also, between their periods of war- 
fare. National peace and prosperity do not 
necessarily imply a state of national health ; for 
they may have, as in the individual, only pride and 
worldliness for their foundation. Immense wealth, 
and progress in the arts that tend to make life con- 
venient and elegant, often precede great national 
calamity. 

Nations, no less than individuals, must learn 
their lessons of humility through disappointment, 
fear, and tribulation. National success induces 
pride and arrogance, a love of conquest, and the 
desire of rule. These passions make nation rise 
up against nation, and have induced all the wars 
that have desolated the earth. 

Nations commit great crimes, and fancy that 
their strength insures them from punishment ; 
but a day of reckoning is sure to come, though it 
may be long delayed. 



WAR AND PEACE. 169 

Our heavenly Father is very patient. He waits 
as if wishing to offer every possible opportunity 
for the sinner to repent and reform ; but at length 
the punishment comes as a natural result and con- 
sequence of the sin, and the might that knows no 
right but its own selfish will is humbled at the 
feet of its victim. 

Civil wars have always been more obstinate and 
malignant than wars carried on by different na- 
tions, as family quarrels are most difficult to 
reconcile ; and contentions waged within our own 
hearts are those that cause us the keenest anguish. 
Where we feel as though we had most right to 
expect friendliness and peace, we are most deeply 
and angrily disappointed if our expectations are 
not satisfied. 

It is very difficult, while the punishment of our 
sins is upon us, to comprehend the justice, the wis- 
dom, and the mercy of that which we are suffering. 
We are apt to think that mercy can be shown only 
by the forgiveness of our sins, and the indulgence 
of our wishes : but sin cannot be forgiven until it 
is repented of; and to stop the sinner in his course, 
and compel him to obedience to the laws of justice, 
is the truest mercy, — the mercy of the highest 
wisdom. 

8 



170 WAR AND PEACE. 

The immediate distress occasioned by war 
causes many persons to feel as though no peace 
could be so bad, that it should not be preferred to 
war ; but peace may be far more disastrous than 
war, if it protects injustice and cruelty. War is 
demoralizing : but a false peace may be far more 
demoralizing, by teaching men to apologize for, 
and to protect, social evils that kill men's souls ; 
which is far worse than to kill their bodies. 

While there is that left in the minds of men 
which leads them individually to injustice and 
tyranny, war will never cease from the earth. The 
human race can never come under the rule of the 
Prince of peace, until each individual submits 
himself to the law of love, and is at peace in his 
own household. It is in vain that peace societies 
labor to prevent war by appeals to kings and gov- 
ernments, while the hearts of the people are full 
of selfishness, and of desire to possess that which 
belongs to others. 

It is a common saying, that bodies of men have 
no consciences ; and the want of honesty and jus- 
tice exhibited by civil corporations and by national 
councils is sometimes astonishing. The morality, 
and sense of right, shown by bodies of men, repre- 
sents the average rectitude of the individuals that 



WAR AND PEACE. 171 

compose those bodies. The only mode by which 
peace societies can advance their cause is by rais- 
ing the morality of the people. Two nations 
wishing to be just can never go to war ; and 
civil wars are impossible among a people that have 
justice in their hearts. Each one of us can con- 
vert his own soul to the gospel of peace ; and, 
bavins: done this, his life will be the best sermon 
he can preach to persuade others to believe the 
same gospel. 

In the struggles that we carry on in our own 
hearts, we cannot conquer our enemies, and come 
into a state of peace with ourselves, until we be- 
come humble, and willing to give up that which 
is wrong within us, and to yield to that which is 
right. Sometimes, after severe internal struggle, 
we make a false peace with ourselves by covering 
over and hiding our sins, so that the world cannot 
see them ; and, compromising with what we know 
to be wrong, we hold fast the sin as firmly as 
before, perhaps in a modified form, but still in 
reality the same. 

So nations often make false peace with each 
other, resorting to subterfuges and compromises, in 
order to escape the miseries of war ; but still 
holding fast to evil in such wise, that the spirit 



172 WAR AND PEACE. 

of war, if not war itself, is sure to rise again out of 
the dregs of the old trouble. 

In the civil war now going on in our own coun- 
try, we shall probably abolish the sin of slavery 
which has occasioned it ; but, unless we abolish 
also the spirit of hatred and contempt for the negro 
which makes us unwilling to give him the rights 
of a citizen, our work will be but half done. 

The North has joined hands with the South in 
prolonging this terrible wrong ; and a large por- 
tion of the North shows the spirit of the slave- 
holder in the efforts it makes to prevent the 
immigration of the negro, or to avoid giving him 
the rights of a man if he is allowed to come within 
its borders. We can never expiate our sin 
against the slave until we do what lies within our 
power to make him a competent citizen of a free 
country. 

The abolition of slavery in the South will be as 
great a revolution of the social state as the aboli- 
tion of the order of nobles in France. The masters 
and mistresses of the South will cling as fondly to 
their peculiar institution as the old French noblesse 
did to theirs ; and we at the North may, in our 
degree, prove ourselves possessed of an entirely 
similar spirit by doing what we can to hold the 



WAR AND PEACE. 173 

negro in an object position in our civil and social 
state. 

The same spirit that animates the European no- 
bility in its oppression of the lower classes animates 
the slaveholder in his oppression of the slave, 
and the same spirit displays itself in every one of 
us when we strive to domineer over others who 
come within the scope of our power in society or 
in our own families ; and it is this same spirit of 
selfish domination that causes nations to go to war 
with one another, and that incites civil wars. 

It is natural to humanity to love to be ministered 
to ; and therefore it is pleasing to the unregene- 
rate mind to feel that there is an abject, servile 
class of beings, either white or colored, on whom 
we can place our burdens while we live at ease. 
' We cannot suppose that society can ever exist 
without the distinction of rich and poor, and it is 
difficult to imagine a society in which the rich and 
the poor will not have many points of antagonism ; 
but, the more Christianized any society becomes, 
the less of this antagonism there will be. If a 
society could be formed on earth, of individuals who 
were true Christians, each at peace in the house- 
hold of his own heart, then all antagonism between 
rich and poor, high and low, wise and simple, 



174 WAR AND PEACE. 

would cease ; then would be seen that which has 
never yet been on earth, — a nation at peace with 
itself. Could the earth be peopled by nations such 
as these, war would cease, and the Prince of peace 
would reign supreme. 

We have little reason to suppose that such a 
state of the world can ever exist ; but this should 
be the model kept within our hearts by which to 
form our own characters. Though perfection is 
not within mortal grasp, or even mortal concep- 
tion, we should keep before our mind's eye the 
highest ideal of it that we can form, in order to 
attain the highest good of which we are capa- 
ble. If we lower our standard of excellence to 
what we think we can actually attain, there is dan- 
ger, that, when we have attained it, we shall stop, 
contented with what we have done. If, on the* 
other hand, we aim at the highest excellence we 
can conceive ; so fast as we approach it, our mental 
horizon will widen, and open out regions still be- 
yond, leading us onward in a progress that will 
never end. 



THE END. 



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